By: Emily Miller, Ph.D.
Monogastric On-Farm Technology and Product Performance Specialist
One example of a tool embraced by Fortified Nutrition and many of its customers are the nursery and finishing PigScales. These are in-pen scales, which determine individual weights from a group of nursery and/or finishing pigs. The set-up is simple and provides a no-stress opportunity to capture body weights of individual pigs as they walk on and off the scale. Capturing individual animal data means that uniformity of the group can be monitored, average weights can be used to make feed changes, and daily gains can be used to monitor general performance (to give a few examples). Quickly, producers can use this body weight data, rather than the ‘eye-ball’ method, to make management or feed decisions.
These PigScales are manufactured in The Netherlands and we currently have more than 90 scales across Canada between Fortified Nutrition and Grand Valley Fortifiers. Connection and data support for the scales are offered through the On- Farm Business Intelligence Team (support@onfarmbi.com). The standard subscription for the PigScale includes an individual customer login with a customizable dashboard for each scale. Depending on what is beneficial to your operation, tables and graphs can be created and adjusted to suit your needs. In addition, weekly emails are sent to individual customers showing the growth curve for the current, previous, and historical batches of pigs. This allows for easy comparison of the current batch to historical performances to track if, for example, management changes were beneficial.
Considering your individual farm’s performance is key to making decisions, but it is also informative to see how other farms are performing on a similar feeding program. To explore this, all customer PigScale data from Western Canada (July 1, 2023 – June 30, 2024) was compiled. This encompassed 250 batches and about 60,000 pigs. Considering the age of the pigs where most data was available, a start age of 28 days and end age of 65 days was used for this benchmark, and only data between these ages was considered. From here, the average weight for each day of age can be calculated. One step further was determining some of the best performing batches of pigs, which in part, can demonstrate how successful the Fortified Nutrition feeding program can be when combined with excellent management practices. The qualifying factor of 60 lbs (27.2 kg) in 60 days was used to classify the “Top Performance”. In Figure 1, the average (dark red bars) and top (light red bars) performance is shown. From 28-65 days of age, the ADG was 540 g/d for the average performance and 610 g/d for the top performance. This highlights the importance of excellent management and health, in addition to high quality feed.
Fortified Nutrition is capturing this kind of body weight data every day and knowing how your pigs are growing is a great step to improving the on-farm efficiency. Once we know the body weights, the next piece of the efficiency puzzle is knowing how much feed is consumed. Pairing these two values together allows for calculation of feed conversion and further opportunities to improve efficiency. The On-Farm Business Intelligence Team is currently investigating tools available in the market to measure feed delivered to individual pens.
Would you like to learn more about the scale program at Fortified Nutrition? Reach out to your representative at Fortified Nutrition or email: support@onfarmbi.com
This article was also written for the Fall 2024 Western & Prairie Swine Grist. To read the whole Western Swine Grist, click the button below.