Five-week batch management system: Challenges and opportunities

Batch management is not new; it is a way of working that has been implemented on farms for almost 20 years.

Generally speaking, batch management has been implemented on small and medium-sized farms, mainly to optimize animal flows by working with larger groups of the same age and to optimize all-in/all-out management and indirectly to concentrate tasks and improve work distribution. However, in recent years and after the emergence of the latest highly virulent strains of PRRS, this way of working has also started to be implemented on larger farms to allow working with fewer and larger batches of animals of the same age and thus emptying certain farm facilities in their entirety, helping to control the disease by "forcing" a strict all-in/all-out and a good sanitary downtime between batches. The batch chosen in this case is undoubtedly the 5-week batch.

With a 5-week batch management system, we will have in theory:

• 4 batches of sows on the sow farm
  • 1 in the farrowing area.
  • 3 in gestation → Although in this phase we theoretically need the open space equivalent of one batch to be able to move sows.
• 1 batch of piglets on the nursery farm. There could be two batches as long as we have the capacity to keep the animals up to nine weeks, but the case of having two batches in the same facility would not be justified because we would lose the sanitary benefit, something we will discuss later.

To know more about how a 5-week batch or other batches work you can use the Batch management simulator from Pig333.

In practice, the reality is that on a 3,000-sow farm, we will never have 750 empty spaces in gestation to move animals, but as we clean farrowing rooms, we will move animals and free up gestation space.

To address the last point and many other aspects of 5-week batch management, we would like to talk to Luis Sanjoaquín and draw on his experience in implementing this system to help us answer some of our questions on the subject:

1. Why are we considering moving to 5-week batches, especially on large farms?

Currently, we do this exclusively to improve the health of our animal flows and reduce the problems caused by age mixing and outbreaks of virulent strains, primarily PRRS, on farms.

2. What advantages can we gain?

	Sanitary: Shorter time to farm stability after a PRRS outbreak. Strict all-in/all-out. Better biocontainment due to age grouping. Increased age at weaning which helps the piglet later and more homogeneous age at weaning by avoiding different ages in lactation.
	Logistical: Large batches that can fill nurseries and finishing barns, separation by sex, size, etc. Concentration and reduction of transports: semen deliveries, piglet pick-up, culling, etc.
	Management: Organization of tasks, although this can also be a disadvantage due to the concentration of the workload. Forced reduction of late piglet adoptions which helps to reduce disease transmission. Ease of use of perifarrowing feed.
	Team management: Concentrating tasks in a single batch facilitates integration, supervision, and training of new personnel. Specific work teams that rotate between farms can be used for each phase.

3. What are the main challenges?

	Management: Creating the batches. Workload with very large batches: More piglets to process and manage. Time to separate males and females. Piglet vaccinations. Not possible to use nurse sows. What do we do? → Use milk replacer and share litters, etc. Managing returns to estrus. Continuous use of altrenogest.
	Sanitary: Forces euthanasia of non-viable piglets.
	Facilities: Spaces on farms → Need for empty spaces for animal movement. A water system that can withstand the pressure of: Several cleaning machines at the same time. All sows with similar needs drinking a lot of water when they are in the last week of lactation. Electrical installations that can withstand the consumption demand of heat mats and heat lamps being on all at the same time at high temperatures, among other things. Loading docks with capacity for a larger number of animals.
	Logistical: Semen → Ensure the availability of semen for the entire breeding herd. Need for trucks to move piglets and cull sows. Emptying of nurseries and finishing barns to ensure all-in/all-out. Cleaning of a large volume of facilities, tools, and equipment at the same time.
	Production: Increased non-productive days → reduced litters/sow/year. Reduced inventory → If the facilities do not allow for proper animal movements.

Surely we have missed some advantages and challenges, but we have tried to share all the ones we have encountered in our experience working with these systems.

We will address some of them in more depth in future articles.