A portable nursery unit which will enable pig farmers to save thousands of surplus piglets has been launched by Suffolk-based Quality Equipment. Based on a containerised module it is fully equipped and delivered to the farm ready-to-use, needing only connection to power and water.
Piglets are reared in near-ideal conditions and automatically fed warm gruel on a little-and-often basis, mimicking the sow’s own feeding pattern.
The highly-insulated unit is divided into self-contained rooms for hygiene purposes, each with two pens providing eight sq m of floor area for up to 25 piglets per pen, depending on their size. Every room has an independent ventilation system, separate slurry tank and a slatted floor equipped with thermostatically-controlled solid heat pads. Two bowl-type drinkers are provided per pen.
The most vital item of equipment is a Transition feeder, developed by Quality Equipment’s R & D department, which ensures that piglets have access to freshly-mixed liquid feed, fed little-and-often as with the sow.
“Modern highly-prolific sows are producing more pigs than they can easily rear and we developed this unit in response to demand,” commented Mark Harding, the company’s design director. It follows a prototype which has been successfully used on an East Anglian farm for over a year and a pre-production unit recently delivered to another large-scale unit.
“These units have enabled these farmers to rear hundreds of extra piglets as they take the pressure off the sows. Our feedback is that piglets from the nursery go on to perform as well as those naturally reared,” he said.
Two sizes of nursery unit are available — a two- and three-room model, costing £24,000 and £34,000 respectively.
