Crystal Spring Colony has an original Summit sow in its herd with 12 weaned litters. She has been rebred to farrow her 13th litter. The data includes only the last litters but the PigChamp sow card shows the average performance as well. The total net fosters (off) from parities 3-12 are 32 piglets.

Parity	7	8	9	10	11	12	Ave
Total born	16	15	12	15	13	16	15.5
Born alive	15	13	12	12	12	15	14.2
Farrow interval	140	140	140	140	139	149	147
Piglets weaned	10	10	11	11	10	n/a	10.3
Ave. weaning age	20	20	20	20	21	n/a	21.3

Congratulations to Spring Point Colony on its development of a new 400 sow farrow-finish barn. The open house saw some five hundred visitors attend on a cool and rainy September day to view the new facilities.

Breeding and gestation areas are complete, only requiring cleanup and disinfection. Boars and gilts will be entered the week of October 2 to begin the breeding program.

The entire building is of Royal Construction – plastic and metal facings filled with concrete. These materials floor-to-ceiling allow easy cleaning; full white brightness; rodent entry prevention and long life without maintenance. The breeding barn is wonderfully bright between the fluorescent lighting and the wall and equipment color to assure the lighting regime for successful breedings. The lights are on timers to assure a 16-hour daytime and 8-hour nighttime.

Gestation stalls have a solid panel as the rear closure, that drops to the slatted flooring level behind the sows. This should provide a cleanliness factor as manure gets trampled through the slats, without a buildup at the rear of the sows. Sows will be fed on the solid portion of the stall, with an ability to nose the feed into the water trough. The water trough will be constantly filled by the automatic pressure mechanism at the end of each row.

Each week’s farrowings will go into an individual room that accommodates the number of pigs weaned. Each room is fully slatted with plastic slats. Feeders in the rooms are in the barrier between segregated barrows and gilts. This segregation will continue through grower and finishing phases.

Things get more interesting in the grower section of the barn. Three weeks worth of pigs will be held on either side of the centre alley. Each week’s pigs will be trained to the automatic weighers installed in the pens.

A week’s worth of pigs will be introduced into the finishing section of the barn; there are four sections to this space that can hold up to 500 pigs. As the pigs grow, they are automatically shifted to the next growing phase through the automatic weighing machines. The weight setting can be adjusted for the appropriate timing and space allotment in each of the three growing sections. The final section is the week’s worth of animals that have reached market weight (determined by management as the best weight for slaughter hog quality) that are held in the loadout section of the barn.

The finishing section is fully slatted concrete over the 60 cm deep gutters. Manure management will allow pulling plugs at both ends to the gutter to assure as little solids buildup as possible.

It will be very interesting to see the productivity and production levels achieved in these new facilities. Some of these innovations will need to be managed from both a routine as well as a mechanical perspective.

Best of luck to this new operation! I expect the barn managers have high levels of anticipation for making this barn turn over like a well-oiled machine for good success.  

Site Design:  Summit Solutions Ltd.