In loose housing facilities, New Standard likes to allow for the fact that pigs, in general, are social creatures. They will thrive not only on healthy interaction with each other but also with the personnel within the barn. Barn designs that allow interaction for pigs that desire it and that would enable the people within the barn to engage with the animals freely are the most successful swine barns.

In group sow, housing with electronic sow feeding (ESF), sows typically hang out with the same friends each day and will even use the same laying area each day.

“We design knowing the social needs of sows and issues that may arise if we don’t meet those needs.”

In a recent tour of the first newly-renovated and converted sow barn on the Pembina Colony west of Morden, MB Kevin Kurbis owner/partner explained the system with help from Stanley Hoffer and his son Silas.

Kurbis said the whole idea behind the Electronic Sow Feeding system or ESF is the sows can spend their entire gestation in an open group rather than in a stall that would typically happen.

Under the old system, this same barn formerly held 600 stalls – with the conversion it contains only 44 stalls.

“Same barn, same footprint, the same number of sows in production, now we’re down to 44 stalls rather than the 600 plus that we had in the same area before,” he said. Moving to large groups of sows allowed the Pembina Colony to use this space properly separating parity stratification with the gilts or P1s in a separate group from the larger animals by allotting square footage differently.

Kurbis said one of people’s biggest fears is how to get these animals to use these systems. In Pembina Colony’s case, they set up two different pens. One they call the self-training pen because it uses several gate systems with feed on one side and water on the other.

“Give them time; those animals figure out how to go back and forth on their own. So after a few weeks of that and introduced to the full ESF station, they know their way in. They know they’re going to get rewarded with feed,” he said. This step takes them to the point of not needing to push these animals through busting employee’s knees every day to make sure they’re doing what they want them to do. It’s giving them time to let their curiosity and intelligence take over.

“If you feed these animals properly without any stress in an area once, they remember where that is and will come back to it,” said Kurbis.

In some cases, people call this a renovation others call it a conversion but needless to say this is what a large part of the industry will need to do by law. In this colony’s case, much of the building infrastructure is in excellent shape.

“But if we have to get rid of our stalls, we still have to do something with those animals,” Kurbis said. “Feeding is the biggest challenge, and if you just pulled all the pins out and let them go wild and free, they’re going to be competing for feed the whole day. So this allows us to move them into a protected station, no other animals can get at them while they eat. They get their ration every day.”

 “The machine can identify them individually by an RFID chip, which says if you’ve come in and you’ve eaten already, I’m going to kick you out. If you haven’t eaten, here’s the amount of feed that you can have,” he said.

Silas Hofer, Stanley’s son, said the best part of this system is coming in each day seeing the animals relaxed instead of laying or standing in a crate as before eating when they want.

“I see a big difference in the sow’s behaviour, comfortable, and moving around by themselves making the work so much easier instead of using force. The system runs itself like Kevin said you keep an eye open, like look after your animals, it’s just way better,” said Silas.

Stanley Hofer, the assistant hog manager, said he’s worked with hogs for 30 years and managed this barn from day one.

“It was a good barn until it started deteriorating. Like the slats started breaking, the stalls started getting rusted and breaking, and it was like fix and repair daily for us. It was quite a challenge,” said Stanley. The Colony markets their hogs through Manitoba Pork and Maple Leaf at Brandon does the processing.

“We don’t have any contracts right now, but we’re going with the flow. The price is pretty good right now, so we’re happy.” •

— By Harry Siemens