Loading...
The Rural Voice, 1988-10, Page 58FARM & INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING & REPAIR • Portable Welding • Millwrighting • Cast & Aluminium Welding • Custom Fabricating • General Machining • Ornamental Railings n MAITLAND WELDING & MACHINING WINGHAM off Hwy. 4 519-357-2727 Spike Bakker 519-528-2520 PLOW PARTS COMBINE PARTS — concaves — cylinder bars — elevator chains by new -life feeds JEROME FEED & SEED Lucknow (opposite the sale barn) 519-528-2447 ROLLER BLOWER MILLS • 1200-3600 bu./hr. capacity with low horsepower requirements * 54" blower fills the tallest silos • Exclusive Mid -West sample door allows sampling while roller is running • 15 new & used units in stock RENTAL UNITS AVAILABLE LOWEST PRICES! MIDWEST SILO SYSTEMS LIMITED P.O. Box 280, Wellesley, Ontario NOB 2T0 519-656-2340 56 THE RURAL VOICE ADVICE "SCORE" IMPROVES SWINE OPERATIONS OMAF swine specialist Jim Dal- rymple has been urging producers to improve their "SCORE" — Sanitation, Closed Herd, Observation, Records, and Environmental Control. Attention to these five points will not, or should not, require a great deal of additional borrowed capital, he says, and improvements in sow productivity, herd health, labour efficiency, and mar- ket hog performance should be marked. When working with lenders or fi- nancial advisors, Dalrymple says pro- ducers should have production informa- tion readily available: • inventory: number of boars, sows, and all ages of market hogs, • sow productivity: pigs/sow/year or pigs/farrowing crate, • piglet mortality, • approximate days to market, • market index. He has also suggested that when a banker or advisor is visiting a farm to assess management level, these consid- erations indicate the degree of control: • sows/farmer or partner (50-75), • health concerns: barn door locked, isolation area for new stock, antibiotic use and storage, veterinary program, • records: sows identified, record cards over farrowing crates, importance of records to producer, • efficient use of farrowing crates (3/ 4 capacity), • OPPMB printout, • general cleanliness, • pig comfort (cleanliness, feed waste, noise level).0 BLOWING SOIL ADDS UP LOSSES Soil scientists in Alberta have re- ported that if you can see soil blowing on a windy day, at least five tons per acre are being lost. They add that it costs up to $34,000 an acre to replace nutrients lost to wind erosion. Even if it were practical to spend this amount of money, they say, it takes about 25 years of intensive management to replace one inch of topsoil lost to erosion.0