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Goal
Facilitate as much as possible the handling of the piglet feeders in the farrowing pens and of the lamps that are used during the first days after the farrowing.
Description
The trick consists in having a pan feeder and a lamp in each of the farrowing pens. This avoids the annoying moving of these items from one room to another one or from one building to another one.
In this 7,000 sow farm in stage 1 in which distances between the different farrowing buildings are quite large, it was very laborious to move the feeders and the lamps from a farrowing building to another one.
We have to bear in mind that we are talking of 350 farrowings per week. This meant loading the 350 creep feeders and the 350 lamps on a van, unloading them in the destination building and installing them, individually, in each farrowing pen. Now each farrowing pen has its creep feeder and its lamp. When they are not used they hang from a wire cable and they do not disturb anybody. When they are needed they are unhanged and after they have been used they are hanged again from the wire cable without the need of walking a single step.
This 'trick' normally appeals to the people that work on the farm because it saves them a lot of scarcely productive time, but not so much to the person who is to pay for the extra tools, but we must be careful: we are saving a lot of work time and we are avoiding the moving of all these tools, but there is the resulting risk that they suffer damages (especially the lamps and the bulbs). Anyhow, these extra tools also become less worn down and in the end they last for more.
In short, anything that results in alleviating the chores of the staff in the farrowing quarters in that stage will result in having more time for taking care of the animals, which is what ends up giving rise to better production results.
