Experiences With a Swedish
Deep-Bedded Swine System

Dan Wilson and Colin Wilson
Swine Producers, Paullina, Iowa,
Members, Practical Farmers of Iowa

Introduction

Colin and I are second generation pasture farrowers. My Dad started pasture farrowing over 30 years ago. It was pasture farrowing that allowed Dad the finances and the freedom to help two sons start farming. We are still avid proponents of pasture farrowing and farrow about 200 litters on pasture each summer.

Colin and I agreed wholeheartedly with Mark Honeyman when he recently made the statement that pasture farrowing is one of the best-kept secrets in the pork industry today. But, as you know, all pasture farrowing has one major problem and that is it is a seasonal system. So to get a more steady cash flow we have always farrowed some sows in the winter in straw-bedded pens in the barn. In this system we always let the sows out of the pens twice a day for feed and water. This worked quite well except it was difficult sometimes to be as scheduled as the sows, for if you start letting sows in and out of their pens twice a day they become very scheduled. This system also becomes harder to manage if you get over about 40 or 50 sows farrowing at one time. Therefore, we had been looking for a low cost system to use in the winter to supplement the pasture system.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, as our families started to grow, we knew that we were going to have to do something to generate more income to support ourselves. We started looking at what our options were. Everyone we talked to was convinced that if we were going to stay in business we were going to have to move into intensive confinement. So we decided to give intensive confinement a try. We remodeled the west side of the barn that was on Colin's farm into a wire-floored nursery. We talked to a widely respected engineer and he designed a state-of-the-art nursery for us. We spent the money and jumped on the confinement bandwagon. We were not pleased with the results. First of all, it "smelled" and we smelled after working in it. Also the pigs were hard to move in and out of that facility. We weren't used to fighting pigs to get them to move where you wanted them to go, because pasture pigs are very easy to move. They run and all you have to do is head them in the right direction. We had tried intensive confinement and we weren't impressed! The question now was where do we go from here?

My wife Lorna and I had the opportunity to go to Sweden in 1994 to visit swine farms over there. We gladly seized the chance to go and were in for the trip of a lifetime. Once we got to Sweden we started hearing a whole different philosophy. You heard nothing about bigger being better but instead we kept hearing the word "quality." The whole focus of the Swedish pork industry was on quality--quality of work, quality of the animal and natural environment, quality of meat, quality of life... This was something Colin and I had always been firm believers in but had always been afraid to become strong advocates of because at that time all the focus seemed to be on volume and getting bigger. Lorna and I toured eight farms that were using a deep-bedded system in at least part of their production system. I fell in love with the system and vowed that I would some day have a deep-bedded system. When we got home, I flooded Colin with a great enthusiasm for what I thought was the greatest system and philosophy I had ever experienced.

At that time we were also looking at what we wanted to do with our farming partnership because we both had kids that were expressing interest in farming. We spent a year discussing where we should go and finally decided it would be in the best interest of all if we started working toward splitting the operation into two separate operations. This would allow each of us the opportunity to work with our own children separately. So it was decided to build new buildings on Colin's farm so that he could have his own hog operation that was big enough to support his family.

In the summer of 1996, we built a new deep-bedded, farrowing and nursery building that was designed after one I had seen in Sweden (Fig. 1). The building is 100 feet long and 48 feet wide and is divided into four rooms, each being 23 feet by 48 feet with a 12-foot high ceiling. On the north side of each room is a three-foot wide walkway that is used for moving hogs in and out and is used for personnel movement in the building. On the south side of the walkway is a three-foot high concrete wall that has ad lib feeders mounted to the hog side. The walkway and feeding area are raised 16 inches higher than the rest of the room. There are six foot by eight-foot portable pens (which are called farrowing boxes) along each of the long walls of the room. On one wall there are five boxes and on the other wall there are six boxes. On the side of the room with five boxes there are waterers along the south wall. Under the waterers a drain takes away any spilled water. On the south wall in each room there is a 12-foot by 12-foot door. This door is used for putting bedding into the room and is where we come in with the skid loader when cleaning the rooms out. These doors are also used for summer time ventilation, creating a cross-flow when the windows on the opposite end of the room are opened.

Each room has its own ventilation system with incoming air being drawn out of the attic at the south end and at the north end there is a duct in the ceiling that leads to a 16-inch variable speed fan. The exhaust ducts are in the ceiling so that there are no fans and no fan noise in the farrowing rooms. The exhaust ducts from the two east rooms exhaust out the east wall and exhaust from the two west rooms is on the west attic wall.

Three to five days before the sows are ready to farrow, the farrowing boxes are set up in the rooms, bedded with straw, and 11 sows are put in each room. We try to group the sows so that all sows in each room will farrow within five days of each other. To start with there is no straw placed in the open area between the two rows of boxes. This is to discourage sows from farrowing in the open area. On each of the doorways in the boxes there is a four-inch roller that is 14 inches above the floor. The roller serves two purposes. First it helps protect the sows_ udders as they go into and out of their boxes. It also keeps the baby pigs in the boxes for at least four or five days. When the piglets start to jump out of the box the front of the box is removed. When all of the piglets in the room are ten to 14 days of age, all the box fronts and sides are removed so that there are 11 sows and their litters running loose in each room. When we remove the boxes we will put in several round bales of straw so that the piglets can lie next to the bales, which offers them some protection from being laid on by the sows. When the piglets are five weeks old, the sows are removed from the rooms and the piglets stay in the rooms until they are nine weeks old, at which time they go to the finishing barns.

Another part of the total system is a 35-foot by 85-foot "hoop house" that houses boars and the sows from weaning through midterm gestation. This hoop has six boar pens along the east side of the building. The center of the building is open with bedding covering a dirt floor. Then along the west side is a 9.5 foot wide strip of concrete which is 14 inches higher than the dirt floor. We feed the sows on this raised concrete pad. Currently we have 48 sows in one big group in this building. The plan is to divide the building into two pens with 24 sows to a pen and to put feeding stalls on the raised pad. This will enable us to give the sows more individual attention. We are very happy with the way this building is working. The sows and boars seem to be very content in this building.

We also have a 35-foot by 75-foot "hoop house" that we use for bedding storage. Since dry, mold-free bedding is essential to this system, it is important to keep the bedding inside. We do not raise enough straw to supply all of our straw needs so we buy big square bales of wheat straw out of South Dakota in the summertime right out of the field. This is when we can get the best price. The man we buy from loves to haul us straw then because this is normally a slow time for his trucks and it means a lot less handling on his part. He can bale the straw and load it on the trucks and he does not have to store it until winter. We have to buy about one third of our straw needs, the rest of our straw we raise ourselves. Some of this straw also goes to the operation on my farm.

In the farrow-to-grow building, while the sows and piglets are in the rooms we add about two 400-pound bales of straw per week over about an 11-12 week period. The bedding pack will start to heat after about seven days from the time the sows first come into the rooms. After about a week, the rooms need very little supplemental heat in the wintertime. We have measured places in the bedding pack where it was running up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So you can see there is quite a bit of heat being produced. When the bedding is composting there is water vapor being given off and you need a fairly high ventilation rate to keep the humidity in the rooms at an acceptable level.

How do we handle the manure from this system? Since all of our manure is in a solid form, we do not need any pits or lagoons, which makes our neighbors happy. When we can, we spread manure directly on crop ground. When we can't direct apply the manure we will windrow the manure in windrows on a concrete pad. The manure that comes out of the gestation hoop and the farrowing-nursery building when mixed as a mass is too dry to compost. So we have been adding wet manure that comes from the finishing floors to the straw bedding that is too dry. This mixing brings the moisture content up so we can get good compost. In Sweden, they were collecting the wastewater from their floor drains in cisterns and pumping this liquid onto their compost piles to get the right moisture content. We could do this also if our concrete pad was closer to the farrowing building. But right now we are using an old feeding floor for our composting site. We are constantly being asked how we can afford the time it takes to handle solid manure. We fell it takes less time to clean out our farrowing barn than it takes to clean a farrowing barn with pits. With the big doors we can drive in with the skid steer loader and clean one room in two hours and this is when we are hauling the manure to the composting site, which is a mile away from the farrowing barn. The real time savings come because we do not have to power wash out the rooms. The reason for not power washing is that the manure is heating while it is in the building and when you clean out the building all the floors are hot. After we clean a room we spread a light layer of lime on the floor and we are ready for the next group of sows. So from our current experience, we don't feel we are giving up any efficiency with this manure handling system. We feel this system could benefit a lot of people and the environment.

When we first started we had a lot of trouble with sows lying on piglets. But as we have learned how to run the system and cull sows that do not work in the boxes, we have gone from losing 2.5 pigs per litter from crushing to where we are currently, which is one pig crushed per litter. Another problem is our summertime heat and humidity. You have to move a tremendous amount of air in the farrowing rooms to keep the sows half-way comfortable. Days with high humidity are harder to deal with than days that are hot with lower humidity. We currently have the capability of moving 3200 cfm of air per hour in each room at maximum ventilation rate. Flies can also be a problem if your fly control program is not top notch.

The first advantage is the atmosphere in the building. There is NO OFFENSIVE SMELL in either the farrowing building or the hoop. Because of the deep bedding management, all of the manure is mixed in with the straw where it starts to compost. There is not the smell that most people associate with confined hogs. The sows and piglets are in a much more natural environment so they are very content and very easy to work with. The health of the sows and piglets has been excellent, with no antibiotics being used in any of the feed. The piglets only receive vaccinations for erysipelas and an iron shot. We have not had to assist any of the sows in the farrowing process and we feel we have a very good environment from a sow's point of view.

In closing I would like to go into a little more detail about our philosophy. We have always felt it is easier to produce and sell a product that our customers want than it is to convince the customer that they want what we have, even if it isn't what they want. We used to sell a lot of feeder pigs and we learned a little bit about customer relations. We sold breeding stock for a little while and it was ingrained a little deeper that the customer is always right. We have always felt that you should treat your animals with respect and patience. Now we are looking at a pork industry in this country that looks at their pigs in terms of how much money they will generate first and the pigs' well-being second. I see an industry that is quickly alienating its customers and is starting to worry about the quality of its product too late. In adopting this system, we see a way to show our customers that we care about the same issues they are concerned about.

Figure 1. Layout, farrow-to-grow barn, Dan and Lorna Wilson farm,
Paullina, Iowa. 44 sows, 4 groups of 11 each.

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