Articles - Management

How does the number of pigs per feeder hole and the group size influence growth performance and ear and tail lesions?

What are the most important points to include when auditing the cleaning and disinfection of a truck that has transported pigs? In this article we focus on visual inspection.

Suicide in farmers is more than six times as high compared to all other workers. But stressful conditions do not have to end in suicide.

When hiring people, attitude is more important than experience. The desire to improve and learn is key.

A new, not yet tested material could help mitigate tail biting in growing and finishing pigs.

Not all progress is made through "smart farming." Here's a simple solution that can greatly improve biosecurity between batches of weaned piglets, preventing recirculation of disease.

In the first part of this article series we addressed how to correctly stimulate oestrus. In this article we continue talking with swine reproduction specialist, Javier Gil Pascual, focusing on heat detection.

Does feeding time affect reproductive performance?

Gilts have more returns to estrus... but why?

An easily performed vehicle traffic analysis can dramatically minimize the risk of cross contamination into your swine facility decreasing potential disease challenges.

Do gilts with greater backfat thickness produce more milk?

The easy and realistic solution is to produce entire boars or to immunocastrate. However, there are countries who are leaning more toward anesthesia.

The European regulations state that before docking tails other measures that prevent tail-biting must be implemented, and therefore a thorough risk analysis must be carried out on each farm.

The second part of this article tells us what we can learn from sow's nesting instinct, creep-feed intake, relationship with the operator and groups formation in camping systems for use in our closed farms.

How much space is needed to optimise performance with the current slaughter weights?

When was the last time that you disinfected your cellphone?

Pig reproduction and summer are not good friends, Heat comes, daylight hours drop, fertility decreases and the vets come across more reproductive pathology than during the rest of the year. Why doing always the same does not always yield the same result?

It is not only related to NPDs, but it can also have a greater impact than we first thought.

Despite its many limitations, outdoor farming is a different way of approaching pig production and it does have some management routines which should make us reflect when we tackle management and design of indoor farms.

How to increase water consumption in piglets during the 2 to 3 days period after weaning using the piglet’s natural curiosity.

Administer long-acting oxytocin to sows that have started farrowing to milk them more easily.

The idea is to avoid semen backflow when we leave a catheter without its cap inside the sow for some minutes after AI.

The two measures studied would allow to reduce liveweight variability at slaughter by 10-15%.

How to have all the information about the weanings available in a simple way.