A purpose-built piglet nursery on a Suffolk farm has saved enough piglets to improve returns by more than £79,000 in just a year.
When Rattlerow Farms installed the portable, container-style nursery on its 600-sow commercial unit at Hill House Farm, Stradbroke, it estimated that it would enable the farm to rear about 700 extra pigs annually. In fact, this prediction was almost spot-on.
Agrosoft records show that average numbers born alive from the prolific Whiteland sows have been remarkably consistent at between 13.5 and 13.7 during the past three years. However, since the delivery of the nursery, designed and built by Quality Equipment, mortality has fallen dramatically with a proportional rise in numbers reared.
Sows are farrowed in batches of 80 every three weeks, and farrowing house manager Jamie Brown weans litters of heavier piglets early to enable the sows to foster smaller pigs. This is normally done at eight to 10 days, but they have been successful in rearing pigs as early as five days.
Transition Feeders within the nursery enable the pigs to be given warm milk initially, then a variety of specialist diets, both wet and dry, as they grow. A trial compared the post-weaning performance of piglets from the farrowing house against piglets reared through the nursery, recording their weights at the weaning age of 28 days and then again 13 days later.
Although the piglets from the nursery were initially lighter than the average from the farrowing house, during the trial period they gained 1.66kg more and finished heavier at 11.54kg, compared with 11.11kg from the farrowing house, an increase of 128g/day/pig across 980 pigs.
Quality Equipment, or QE, was founded by Glynn Baker in 1965. Based in Woolpit, the small Suffolk village, QE is a third-generation family business, and its family nature is an integral part of its culture and a major attraction for many customers.
At Quality Equipment we pride ourselves on our excellent bespoke designs and customer service. Below are a few of our recently designed and tested products, which have been crucial pieces of equipment for reducing manual labour on farm and improving efficiency and accuracy.
The Mini Transition Feeder (MTF) is an innovative solution designed to support early gastrointestinal tract development of piglets, consequently producing healthy and uniform litters with greater vitality and high weaning weights.
