Articles - Management

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.

The authors share their strategies in the face of tail biting outbreaks as well as on-going preventative measures.

The goal is to be able to make that some individual dispensers do not deliver feed when they are all full

The authors share their experience on tail biting risk factors identification as well as the production of non-docked pigs.

There are casualties in the farrowing unit due to poor colostrum intake but, how many are there really? Are they just being classified as non-viable piglets?

The goal is to improve the piglets’ starter feed consumption in the farrowing pens.

The use of a thermometer or other technologies not so usual such as thermography for diagnosing sensitive situations cheaply, easily and objectively.

The key lies in gilt management ...

Occasionally, breeders end up using semen with a suboptimal fertilizing ability due to inadequate storage conditions.

By writing down the sow’s number directly onto a piece of paper or a card we do not lose information

More attractive for the pigs, more comfortable for farmers.

We talk about weight and age at mating, stall adaptation, flushing, how to perform heat detection and insemination, the convenience or inconvenience of segregating the gilts