There’s a cool way to make almost a buck more per pig, says a Prairie Swine Centre researcher.
All it takes is the flip of a switch.
Tests have shown that cooler pigs grow faster than hotter pigs in the summer, a result that can be achieved by continuously running barn ventilators.
“The slight differences (in production) are enough to realize gains if you calculate the economic benefit,” said PSC researcher Bernardo Predicala during the Focus on the Future conference March 8 in Winnipeg.
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Predicala’s research found that pigs in cooler rooms at night had average daily gain rates 2.1 to 5.2 percent higher than in rooms that were two
degrees C warmer.
Predicala believes the gains in growth came from the cooler pigs eating more. Pigs in the cool rooms ate an average of 3.2 percent more than in the hotter rooms.
The cooling demanded no extra equipment. The only difference with normal production was leaving the ventilation fans running all night, bringing in the maximum amount of cool air from outside.
Usually fans run only when the preset temperature threshold is reached. Many times during the night the fans will not operate if a high threshold is set.
Predicala set the ventilation fans to run in the test rooms until the temperature fell to six degrees below the usual nighttime temperature, a threshold the barns never reached. That meant the fans kept running.
Predicala said that after the cost of running the fans is subtracted from the gain from faster pig growth, the bottom line is an 80 cents per pig net gain for any pig sold over the summer.
A two degree temperature difference may seem small, Predicala said, but “it is enough to affect the performance of the pig.”
Best of all, this production gain comes with no extra machinery or capital cost. It’s just a matter of flipping the switch to keep the fans going.
