Page 12 of articles about sow in Articles

The two main factors that make that certain farms have not been successful adapting to the animal welfare regulations are design and handling/management.

Which factors affect the WTSI? Among the factors with a biggest influence we have: inadequate intake during lactation, season of the year, and length of the lactation.

This feeding system has a great return on investment, especially for the lactating sows, and even more in hot areas.

The goal is to identify the number of returns to oestrus of the sows quickly and at a glance using coloured pegs.

The piglets born to primiparous sows show a worse performance during the nursery stage and a twofold risk of dying than the piglets born to multiparous sows.

In the previous piece of advice we saw that obtaining foster sows by moving piglets "forward" had some disadvantages, which are solved by moving the sows "backwards".

Small piglets with a low viability are a growing problem, and they represent one of the main causes of pre-weaning mortality.

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.

Constipation is one of the factors that are involved in pre weaning piglet mortality.

Lameness is the second most common cause for the culling of sows.

One of the most frequent recommendations for improving the feed consumption in sows during lactation is using pelleted feed instead of meal. Nevertheless, this recommendation is not very well supported by experimental evidences.

We achieved it combining the use of two ear tags per sow together with their strategic location in order to avoid losses due to biting.

The goal is to protect the nipples of the future breeding sows during their first days of life.

Farrowing is a painful and stressful process, especially in the case of gilts and dystocic farrowings.

The registration of the sow losses/cullings in the management computer programs is normally something easy, but it is not always given the importance that it really has so, sometimes, the registration is incomplete, with wrong dates and without writing down the cause of the loss/culling. Nevertheless, its correct registration and its later analysis can give us very useful information for the correct technical-financial management of the farm.

The sow must be able to store enough calcium during the pregnancy to face the possible mobilizations during the lactation.