Stretching farrow-to-finish to encompass the 'Danish way'

Can traditional Ontario farrow-to-finish operations be stretched to encompass top Danish producer Henrik Jensen's innovative pig production techniques?

Courtesy Better Pork Magazine February 05 SUBSCRIBE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US

Jim and Hallie Bloxsidge, who farm near Holbrook, south of Woodstock, are willing to try. They finish all of the production from 1,600 sows on homemade feed in three of their own barns and at a contract finisher, and ship about 35,000 heavy pigs a year to a niche market in Indiana.

Annual weaned pig production is a respectable 25 pigs per sow, but Jim Bloxsidge sees potential to reduce pre-weaning mortality and produce a couple more live pigs per sow by adopting some of the techniques espoused by Jensen, the featured speaker at a breeder meeting in Stratford in December.

Bloxsidge thinks this can be achieved by putting more labour into his farrowing barn, but he admits that some of Jensen's techniques, particularly those of highly intensive cross-fostering of pigs onto gilts, run counter to 30 years of pork production experience. The idea of weaning a gilt of her piglets and replacing them with 13 large, hungry pigs to extend her lactation to 35 days is hard to embrace.

"We always believed in putting nine or 10 on a gilt.....we didn't want to stress her too much. The idea of putting 13 (pigs) on a gilt blew my mind," Bloxsidge says.

He says he wasn't the only producer at the meeting who felt that way, noting incredulous faces around the room when Jensen was talking and skeptics thinking, "No way this would work."

Nevertheless, as soon as the Bloxsidges got home from the meeting they directed some of their gilts towards a cross-fostering program. On some gilts, piglet numbers were reduced to 10 or 11 from 13 because the gilts were losing body condition fast. "Some gilts will do it and some gilts won't," says Hallie, who handles the paperwork at Biloxy Farms Inc. and relieves the farrowing barn supervisor on weekends and holidays.

"You look at the gilts where we have been putting a second litter on them. I think they are doing remarkably well," Hallie says. She warns, though, that "if the odd gilt goes in undersized, she is not going to grow."

Henrik Jensen, of course, espoused feeding gilts to a heavier weight before breeding and the Bloxsidges have some experience with breeding heavier gilts and are enthusiastic about the potential for extra production there. At one point last year, they had a gilt surplus and they fed some of them to a higher weight before fitting them into the breeding system. "When they farrowed, it was a dream," Jim Bloxsidge says. Each gilt produced between 13 and 20 live piglets. "The bigger gilts were producing like sows," he recalls.

All of their sows are bred with Danbred semen, both for gilt production and for market pigs.

The Bloxsidges have been shipping heavy pigs to the United States for many years. Then he switched to markets in Ontario to reduce trucking costs. About a year ago, his heavy pig buyer in Ontario, who wanted pigs that dressed at 115 kilograms, went out of business and Jim found a new customer, a Tyson plant 400 miles away in southern Indiana.

Jim and Hallie Bloxsidge have 10 employees. Their operation makes feed from 400 acres of its own corn and a lot of purchased crop besides. "It keeps us going," Jim says. Bloxsidge has been doing his own nutrient management work for a number of years and has been meeting requirements well ahead of the current laws, but he's hired a local consultant to handle that as the nutrient management rules get more complex.

Feeding pigs to get them to the heavy weight that Tyson wants hasn't been a problem. These pigs don't seem to get fatter; they just keep growing, Bloxsidge says. He is feeding a very high-energy home-made ration, with five per cent extra fat, as suggested by Jim Reid, the representative for Kenpal, the Centralia-based premix maker.

These pigs don't get to taste a finisher ration. "They stay on a grower 2 ration to market weight, Bloxsidge says. The pigs are going to market carrying 0.78 to 0.82 inches of back fat, equivalent to 20 millimetres.

While it appears to be counterintuitive, bumping up the fat in the diet (increasing energy) reduced back fat by about two millimetres on hogs of the same weight. It seems that the balance between energy and fat makes for a more digestible feed. The ration is balanced for five amino acids including lysine.

Reproduced Courtesy Better Pork Magazine - February 2005