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In swine farming, farrowing assistance is one of the tasks with the greatest impact on the number of piglets produced per sow per year. The farrowing attendant aims to maximize the number of live piglets, trying to:
- Reduce the number of stillborns by regularly monitoring the rate of piglet expulsion and, eventually, intervening pharmacologically and/or manually if necessary.
- Limit neonatal mortality of the weakest piglets and, above all, avoid crushing.
In this phase of production (together with insemination), human attention is focused on the sow as an individual animal, in contrast to the rest of production, where the caretakers' attention is directed to the group.
This is why it is important to know things about that particular animal: its age, parity, character, etc... in other words, about its entire productive life (if the data has been collected!) and the more we know, the better we can predict its behavior at farrowing and decide how much of our time and attention it needs.
Assuming that much of this data has been collected in previous farrowings, we have to read it sow by sow and, if there are many sows... we run the risk of "wasting" a lot of time with the wrong animals.
But there's a solution.
When we have printed the sow's card that will go to the farrowing room with all her data (maybe in the afternoon, at a leisurely pace), we stop to read it, evaluate her character, if she is nervous, if she has had stillbirths, if she usually crushes piglets, etc... And if we think that this sow needs more attention at farrowing, we add to the card a big red text that will grab our attention at farrowing time. "You can be sure," says Agostino, the inventor of this stamp, "that when you see the red you will pay more attention to this sow".
This is the stamp that Agostino has prepared: WARNING, PAY ATTENTION, which he stamps on the cards of the sows that he considers to be "risky".
The card is hung in the farrowing pen, in a clearly visible place, with the red text and the number of dead and crushed piglets during their reproductive life highlighted.
The card is used during farrowing to record important events and the various pharmacological treatments eventually used on the sow.
