Those unfamiliar with well-designed group housing for sows may think that a large open pen will be prone to stress, higher disease rates and an increase in general health problems. With good hog barn designs, sows are actually maintaining good health in loose housing. It's easier than you might think. 

Kees (Kase) van Ittersum has been with New Standard as part owner since its beginning. He specializes in hog barn design and has been involved in Electronic Sow Feeding (ESF) since 1995. The group sow housing and ESF movement started in Europe in the late 90s while Kees was still living in the Netherlands. There he gained a great amount of experience with loose housing hog barn design and equipment.

When he moved to Canada in the early 2000s, the movement had not yet reached North America, but he knew it would soon come. While Kees has always sold ESF and loose housing equipment with the focus being on barn efficiency and precision farming, North American animal welfare pressures kick started the group sow housing movement around 2007. Learn more about Kees and his role in the development North American sow housing.

When feeding sows, our focus should always be on each sow's health. Keeping your sows healthy will both improve their performance and reduce your production costs. When determining how to feed sows during gestation, the following overarching goals should always be top of mind.

We are all aware of the pressure on producers to switch to group gestation pens, but making this transition is not an easy task. It is especially difficult when we hear horror stories and find research showing the problems that arise with feeding sows in loose pens. We want to put you at ease and tell you what it is like in a well-designed hog barn by busting some of the common myths you have probably heard about group sow housing. 

Did you know you can automatically identify and sort your pigs without having to lift a finger? That means you don't have to search out the pigs you need in a large sow pen. Rather than wasting your time trying to find that last sow you need to preg-test or vaccinate, just let her come to you!

Data analysis in pig production has long been essential to making smart management decisions. Now as the industry moves to group sow housing, data is more important than ever. There is a common belief that you cannot track sows efficiently in open hog pen designs, but that is simply not the case. With the proper barn design and data management system in an open sow pen, you are able to track daily performance metrics much better than you could in a stall barn.

Although you are able to track sow performance much better in group sow housing barn, it takes a well-engineered hog pen design and data collection platform. With the proper system, such as the Velos platform used by Nedap, data really is money. You are able to catch performance issues earlier, and you are able to fine tune your operations to be as efficient as possible, saving you on feed and labor, as well as other operating costs.

Legislation around the world is requiring farmers to convert to loose sow housing. As we transition our hog barn designs, we are all learning from one another on how to make group housing more efficient and productive than gestation stall barns. Through our learning and dozens of conversions and new builds, we have found Nedap Electronic Sow Feeding equipment and proper gestation pen design to be the key factors in a successful loose sow housing facility.

This is often one of the first questions we are asked when talking through an ESF group gestation pen design. We completely understand the importance of this question because as producers, you have to monitor your overhead and operating costs closely in order to turn a profit. While there is significant importance behind this question, we challenge everyone to not only focus on the costs in your barn, but also the impact each aspect of your barn has on your production totals. Learn more on how to calculate the value each of your ESF stations add to your production.