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His Sows Love To Shower
Cleaning and disinfecting a farrowing room doesn’t do much good if you bring in sows that have been in loose housing, says John Van Engelen of Hog-Tied Farms in Thedford, Ont. He solved the problem by adding a sow shower.
    He renovated an unused hallway that had a gutter underneath by removing the plywood floor and installing concrete slats. He mounted a used sprinkler system (mister used for cooling cattle) on the wall, set up an animal-safe soap disinfectant applicator and placed cattle brushes on the wall.
    “The sows were not scared and there wasn’t a problem with the shower. They were walking around scrubbing themselves, especially on hot summer days,” Van Engelen says. “But I need to take the brushes out and put indoor/outdoor carpet on the walls. The brushes were a little too hard for the sows, and they started getting scratch marks.”
    Harvest season slowed him down, but he hopes to add the carpet and a water heater to give the sows lukewarm water for the winter.
    “I also plan to use the same sprinkler on the wean sows,” he adds.
    While he doesn’t have a lot of problems with bacteria and health issue in his family’s 250-sow farrow-to-finish operation, Van Engelen says he thinks the shower provides extra insurance for the group sow housing setup he converted to a couple of years ago.
    Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Van Engelen, Hog-Tied Farms, 7912 Gordon Rd., Thedford, Ontario Canada N0M 2N0 (ph 519 933-6514; hogtied@execulink.com).


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2017 - Volume #41, Issue #1