The Rural Voice, 1982-05, Page 9That's why there are only seven pens
downstairs. It was walled off and now has
one room for a washroom. complete with
toilet and a shower. The office itself
contains a desk with files and records, a
medication fridge, a place for barn clothes
and boots and a coffee pot. The electrical
panel is in this area and so is the stereo.
Nahrgang's pigs are keen listeners to
CKGL, Kitchener, country music 24 hours
a day. "Rock and roll doesn't help them
perform," Nahrgang says. He says with
music on all the time, loud noises like
doors banging doesn't bother the pigs.
The Nahrgangs have a work schedule; it
takes four hours to do their work in the
morning and less than an hour at night.
Aisles are swept every morning after
feeding and the boar pens are scraped.
Mondays are for shipping pigs and
cleaning the emptied pens. Tuesdays.
weaner pigs are moved to the newly
cleaned pens. Tuesday and Wednesday
the weaner decks are cleaned and
disinfected. Thursday, the piglets are
weaned and put into decks and the
emptied farrowing units cleaned. Sows
are moved into the crates on Friday and on
Sunday, the pigs are weighed for
Monday's shipping.
A daily and weekly record is kept by the
Nahrgangs; each sow has a card and all
pigs are ear -notched. They devised their
own charts and had them printed locally.
They maintain a sixty-five to seventy sow
herd, although Nahrgang says it's a little
crowded at seventy. "It's fine on paper
but leaves little room to manoeuvre." he
says. "In theory, three sows are bred
every week and three sows farrow every
week."
Pigs in the weaner decks and the
finishing barns are fed automatically. The
sows and boars are fed only once a day in
the morning, twelve pounds of feed to
nursing sows and six to dry sows.
Nahrgang fills the feed carts again right
after feeding just in case the hydro goes
off. This way, he says, cold feed is not fed
to the pigs in the winter.
The Nahrgangs raise and sell Hamp-
Duroc boars and York-Landrace gilts.
Days to market for feeder pigs average 170
and last year's market hog index was 104.
Considering the top gilts are taken from
these pigs. it's the culls that index 104.
New sows brought into the herd to keep
the numbers up, are quarantined in a pen
by themselves. Nahrgang says there's
room for flexibility in his system. If short
of room, he sells weaners.
Manure from the sow barns is flushed
two times a week and the finishing barn.
four times a day. In the holding tank room,
aerators add oxygen to the manure to
eliminate odour. Fresh air is brought in
from the eaves and fumes are removed
with the aid of fans. The main manure tank
behind the barn is 70 x 12 and holds
288,000 gallons.
Heat in the barn is provided by a
181.000 B.T.U. propane heater hung on
the outside of the barn. Fresh air to the
feeder barns comes from a perimeter slot
inlet with automatic control. To provide
more precise air flow, all of the fans are
variable speed controlled. Air for the main
barn comes from the top of the barn, the
former mow area.
Last May, the Nahrgangs both quit their
off -farm jobs and all their time is spent
maintaining an efficient hog operation.
Bill Nahrgang says if he had to do it all
over again. there'd be some changes
made. He'd put a drain at one end of the
office, near the loading chute so he could
hose down the ramp rather than trying to
sweep it clean. He would like to have the
weaner decks in a separate room away
from the farrowing crates. The weaner
pigs need a totally different atmosphere
than the sows, he says.
As for the costs, the Nahrgangs say they
cut them in half by doing the work
themselves when they renovated and
added to their barn in 1978. That would
buy a lot of pig feed.
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John Hazlitt 524-7474
Alex Connell 343-5224
Gordon Strang
Bev Hill
THE RURAL VOICE/MAY 1982 PG. 7