Farmer Focus: Nasty surprise after progress on shade for pigs
© Tim Scrivener Last month in my column I was writing about ideas I’d had for providing summer shade for our breeding sows.
I was hoping it would further support our high animal welfare ethos, take a bit of pressure off the mud wallows and, in doing so, save us some time, mechanisation, and water – all of these have risen in cost considerably over the past 12 months.
See also: 7 ways to minimise heat stress in outdoor pigs
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Things have progressed at pace since then, in part thanks to a Farmers Weekly reader seeing my article.
He works for a business that is already involved in providing temporary shades for other livestock species, as well as sheeting for silage storage and farm building windbreaks.
He kindly arranged for a couple of off-the-peg 6x4m shades to be sent out.
And with very little adaptation, they have provided a perfect shade area spanning between a pair of jumbo dry sow arks, pretty much exactly how I first envisaged.
I have also created a couple of dry sow ark structures. By using 1m-high, ballasted 500-litre plastic tanks as legs, I now have what has been appropriately nicknamed the “gazebo” ark.
It has a tank under each corner, raising the ark impressively high off the ground and I have also created the half gazebo, which just has one end raised by two tanks.
The later looks a bit odd and will probably not remain as it is because the sows find the tapering side gap a bit difficult to judge during entry and exit.
The hope is we can study sow behaviour and do some data recording during the hottest summer months.
Encouragingly, I have already heard of other pig farms taking a renewed look at the provision of shade; it’s nice not to be going it alone.
But life is never simple and in the past few days both herds have tested positive (or at least unstable) for PRRS (porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome) after piglet ear prick blood tests.
We are all hoping that a double round of mass vaccination, and the inclusion of an immune modulator in all our feed rations, controls things before too much damage is done to our pride and balance sheet.