Different stages in the growth of piglets
To keep the number of journeys made by the knacker’s truck to a minimum, I keep the carcasses of dead piglets in a freezer until I have three or four to go at once.
As I was bagging the carcasses for removal yesterday, I realised, with three piglets going from the same litter but at different ages, it was a good opportunity for illustrating just how quickly pigs grow.
The piglet at the bottom of the photograph was the runt of the litter.
She weighed just 750g when farrowed, but when she was crushed three days later she weighed 900g—a 20% weight gain in three days.
The second piglet, another gilt, was crushed on 23 June, 10 days after farrowing.
When farrowed, the gilt weighed 1.2kg. When it died, it weighed 2.05kg. This was a 70.8% weight gain in 10 days.
The third piglet, yet another gilt, weighed 1.1kg when farrowed and 4.85kg when it died. This was a 340.9% weight gain in 19 days.
In general, we’ve found that Berkshire piglets from our lines (Namatjira-Mermaid, Ambassador-Suzanne) have grown to 3.5 times their farrowing weight by the time they’re three weeks old.
But while this seems fast, commercial pig operations achieve much higher results through selective breeding, early weaning (milk production by sows limits piglet growth after about 8 or 9 days of lactation) and specialist creep feeds.
We prefer the slower approach as it suits our welfare, quality and taste goals, but even when grown “slowly” it’s still amazing how quickly a very small piglet can turn into a large bruiser of a porker.
I’m curious, Stoney, are you required to have them disposed of officially? Such little bodies they are! On our place we have a “charnel ground” back in our woods where carcasses are gently laid. They become part of the cycle quite shortly. Friends of mine use either a large composting pile or dig burial holes. We still take the loss of livestock, of course, but not a cost of disposal as well.
S.
The Animal By-Products (Scotland) Regulations 2003 makes it illegal to bury or burn fallen stock on-farm. There’s an equivalent regulation in England and Wales.
The reasoning is that “the degradation process essential to ensure reduction of BSE/TSE infectivity could not be guaranteed by burial. Even after burial scrapie infected material can persist in the soil for years and present a source of infection. Improper burial can also cause pollution problems and act as a vector for the transmission of disease to man, animals, birds, & insects.”
Of course, no BSE/TSE has been found in pigs, but the regulations cover all livestock.
Over and above that, you don’t really want large industrial farms burying dozens of dead animals a week, especially if they’re close to water supplies used for human consumption.
The problem is that for small-scale farms like ours, the regulations are disproportionate to the risks. The costs of implementing the regulations are also much larger as a proportion of our earnings.
None of us would want industrial farms disposing of carcasses in their back yards. Ugh! Horror! We are a much larger back yard here, I suppose, and small-holders are still un-messed with in this regard. We do have a scrapie monitoring program that requires veterinary participation for certification. But otherwise we are still on our own about disposal. Also, we haven’t had your devastating recent experience with Foot and Mouth Disease. Not to say we won’t ever. During that, I looked at my own flock and was close to tears just contemplating the possibilities.
Sorry, by the way, about your piglet.
Skep