The Rural Voice, 2005-04, Page 22Nutrient
Management Act
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18 THE RURAL VOICE
more feeding area and ensuring the
feed is widely spread to make it
difficult for sows to claim a
disproportionate amount of feed. The
extra space, however, will reduce one
of the attractions of floor feeding —
cost — because it naturally costs
more.
Competition in small groups that
are floor fed can be intense with as
many at 10-15 per cent of sows
having to be pulled. European
legislation already suggests such
highly competitive systems are not
acceptable. The North American
concentration on good sow nutrition
also points to the reality that better
control over feed intake than floor
feeding allows will be necessary.
An alternative is trickle
feeding. In the trickle system
sows are fed in partial stalls
which give protection to the head and
shoulders of the feeding sow without
extending very far into the pen. In
each feeding space, feed is metered
in at a set rate, representing the
eating speed of the animals in the
pen. Because feed is distributed at the
same rate that the sow can cat, no
feed accumulates and it doesn't
benefit a sow to move from space to
space attempting to steal from other
animals.
This system can be operated using
a drop feed system in which case it's
called a short -stalls system.
Pigs must be sorted into groups
that have relatively the same eating
rate since sows eat much faster than
gilts and will steal food from their
slower -eating juniors. The result is a
number of small, uniform groups.
Trickle feeding has been popular
in Britain but isn't widely used in the
rest of Europe. It has been used
where conventional stall barns were
renovated to incorporate an
inexpensive, modified trickle feeding
system. Gonyou says it's not clear
that such modified systems can
adjust the rate of feed drop in
different groups.
Better control of individual
nutrition can be attained be using
individual feed stalls. At feeding time
the pigs go into a stall where pigs can
be given feed according to their
individual needs with pigs needing
more feed being topped up by hand.
This is an expensive use of space,
however, because it requires both a
loose -pen loafing area and a feeding