Open barn behaviour | Well designed barn caters to social groups
RED DEER — Open sow barns used to fail because the designs were not pig friendly.
Agricultural engineer Kase van Ittersum says open barn systems have made significant strides since they were introduced 30 years ago.
Designers now understand more about sow behaviour, he added.
Van Ittersum designs and sells a system that includes electronic feeding stations and open plans where the sows can form social groups, feed without disturbances, rest and get exercise.
“A lot of group housing systems were set up wrong,” he said during the annual Alberta Pork Congress in Red Deer March 28-29, where his system was on display.
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“They don’t think from the animal point of view.”
Van Ittersum represents the European company Nedap Velos, which manufactures electronic livestock management systems. He helps design and incorporate these systems in existing and new barns.
All new barns in North America have switched to an open system in the last five years, and his customers have found no decline in production.
An electronic system can provide farmers with more information because it records weights, amount of feed consumed and warnings about which sows are in heat using radio frequency ear tags and antennas mounted in the feeders.
Staff can also use an electronic wand to read the ear tags for other management information.
The barns are designed so that large groups of sows can live together and move freely to the feeders, resting areas and eventually to breeding stalls and farrowing areas.
“We need a minimum of 100 sows in a group,” he said. “It gives enough space for them to walk away if there is an interaction and things are being settled without them hurting each other. If it is a big group, they can be anonymous in that group.”
A gate closes when a sow walks into the feeding station so that no others can push or shove it away. An antennae reads the sow’s tag and delivers a specific amount of food based on the sow’s size. Water is also available there.
Sows rest on concrete, and the atmosphere in the barn is quiet.
They tend to stay with their own group of four to seven and rest in the same place all the time, which makes it easy for staff to find individuals.
“The biggest challenge I have had is convincing people this is animal welfare driven and it is actually a higher performance system.”
Naysayers may have experienced a poorly designed system, he said.
Gilts in a well designed barn are trained to use the feeders and be-come used to the social groups.
About one-quarter of new pigs figure out how the electronic feeders work in the first day when introduced to the system. It may take the rest of them up to a week to understand.
Sows may fight to get fed if there aren’t enough feeding stations. About 40 sows per station is reasonable.
“Group housing for sows in my opinion is the better way of doing it,” van Ittersum said.
European countries are passing laws to force producers to switch from sow gestation stalls to open barns, but van Ittersum thinks food companies will mandate the change in North America.
“It will be retailer driven here. I can’t see it becoming the law,” he said.
Researchers in the European Union are working with government and farmers to make the switch to open barns easier. Holland is banning individual sow stalls by 2013, said swine welfare researcher Herman Vermeer of UR Livestock Research in the Netherlands.
He told the recent Alberta Farm Animal Care Association annual meeting in Red Deer that the United Kingdom and Spain have used group housing for several years while Denmark and Germany are in transition. Southern Europe is further behind.
The law will require sows to always be in groups except a week before giving birth. Each sow should have 2.25 sq. metres of space, but they can have 10 percent less space if there are more than 40 sows.
He said 75 percent of Dutch farms had already switched to group housing and the remainder are in transition or are leaving the business.
Research shows farrowing rates and piglet survival are about the same as in traditional systems and there is no difference in growth rates.
By monitoring the number of scratches and wounds on each pig, researchers have found that those in stalls had fewer injuries than those in open systems because they faced less aggression from dominant sows.
Some farmers complained productivity declined in open systems.
“Every system can function with good and bad results,” Vermeer said.
There is room for improvement in housing and farm management to make it work better, he added.
“We found good results for all kinds of systems. We found the management of the pig farmer is most important,” he said.
