Behind the Lines - August 2015

Saturday, August 8, 2015

In this month's cover story, senior staff editor Don Stoneman delves into the benefits of batch farrowing, squeezing your sows' breeding and birthing into narrow windows so that more of the same type of work in your sow barn is done at one time. The benefits are increases in efficiencies, more opportunities to ship large numbers of the same-sized pigs at once and, maybe most importantly, increased biosecurity as otherwise continuous-flow barns are turned into temporarily all-in-all-out operations.

Better Pork last carried a story about this decades-old management technique in 2006. Despite its benefits, it has not been widely adopted in Ontario, even though all of the above apply. Proponents acknowledge batch farrowing has many benefits, but is not for all producers. Still, health concerns are a driver and last year's Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea outbreak has heightened concern and awareness of biosecurity well beyond that of a decade ago. Has batch farrowing's time come?

Your opinion about batch farrowing or any other production decision may not matter if you lose your "social license." In a sobering Second Look column on our back page, Crystal Mackay describes the importance of maintaining public trust, citing the consequences Britain now faces by losing it. Norman Dunn's Eye On Europe feature drives the point home with an outline of a new European Union pork labelling proposal that would specify things like farm of origin, space allocation, organic and access to outdoors/straw. The proposal was initiated by Germany's Green Party which also wants a 30 per cent increase in space allocation for confined pigs.

The April issue of Better Pork inadvertently carried a photograph of a sow in a farrowing crate in association with a Second Look column written by producer James Reesor about dry sow stalls. We apologize for the error and any embarrassment this may have caused. BP

ROBERT IRWIN