The Rural Voice, 1998-10, Page 22Research for a new farrowing system has now found its way
into a handful of pork operations and early results show
It pays to keep mamma happy
Story and photos by Keith Roulston
Tim Gerber (left) says the early
rewards of the new Farrownest
farrowing system have been a
space saving, fewer crushed
piglets and healthier, more
contented sows. The system
combines the oval farrowing
crates (lop in the Gerbers'
barn) designed by Dr. Frank
Ilurnik and Jim Morris with
the warm kennels of the
Nuertingen system (seen below
in an experiment at the
University of Guelph's Arkell
research farm in 1996.
18 THE RURAL VOICE
rofessor Frank Hurnik would
p
be pleased to hear Tim and Art
Gerber talk about the new
farrowing crates they installed in
their barn near Gadshill in Perth
County. It's not just that the Gerbers
think they're getting more live and
lively pigs from the new crates,
designed by Dr. Hurnik and Jim
Morris of Ridgetown College, but the
reason they installed the crates. The
oval design actually takes up Tess
room than conventional crates
allowing the Gerbers to make use of
a narrow available space in an old
nursery that would have been
impossible with conventional crates.
Back when we talked about his
new design ideas in 1993, Hurnik
was concerned that he had to make
the crates practical enough so farmers
would be willing to replace the old
rectangular crates with the oval ones,
which were designed after
observations of sow behavior.
While Tim Gerber likes the new
crates for all the reasons Humik had
in mind such as keeping the sows
happier and losing fewer piglets to
crushing, it was the space
requirements that caused him and his
father to select them. They'd built a
new finishing barn and hot nursery
and the old nursery at only nine feet
wide, was too narrow to
accommodate the traditional crates
and two aisles needed, one at each
end of the crate. But since the new
oval crates allow the sow to turn
around, they needed only one aisle
and could make full use of the space.
The Gerbers bought only part of
the package now called Farrownest
and manufactured by J. K. Reid at
Moorefield. Hurnik's design now
incorporates the oval farrowing crate
with the concept of keeping young
pigs in heated kennels, ideas brought
to Canada by Dr. Gerhard
Schwarting of Germany (Rural
Voice, May 1996). Because of their
space situation the Gerbers attached
their own home-made kennels to the
crate, allowing the piglets a warm,
safe environment away from their
mother.
But the heart of the Farrownest is
still the crate Hurnik designed after
his studies of animal behavior led
him to believe that the old
rectangular farrowing crates had
greatly reduced labour, but were not