Luis Sanjoaquin Romero

We are launching a series of articles that will delve into a new practice that has already been implemented on several farms in Spain and is being adopted by others: 5-week batches.

We focus on moving surplus piglets, which forces us to use nurse sows. We explain two ways to do this in a very visual video.

Here are three basic rules for deciding if and when to do cross fostering and use nurse sows.

Milk supplementation shows much higher growth rates in the fattening stage, so its implementation would be interesting to regain body condition in animals with low birth weight.

If we decide to use foster sows to wean the "extra" piglets farrowed by hyper-prolific sows, we must decide which system is best suited to our farm and our management conditions.

This watch has three circles: the blue one represents the hours, the green one the liveborn piglets, and the red one the stillborn piglets.

In many cases, the use of materials that lessen the piglets' boredom helps to control the problem.

There are many home-made options that allow us to carry out this so important technique on our farms.

A very simple system for monitoring the heats of replacement gilts that consists of putting them ear tags at each of the two heats during the quarantine period.