We focus on the next generation of pig farmers! Not just for our own business, but because, all over Hungary, we need students with more practical knowledge of the pig production.
Bonafarm Group is one of the biggest agricultural businesses in Central Europe. And with 670,000 pigs produced annually, the pig breeding integration is a vital part of Bonafarm Agriculture.
There is a reason the pig breeding integration manages arrange long-term contracts with many of their partners. Their loyal partners are a result of the entire package; the high quality gilts that are produced, the extensive protocols as well as the comprehensive support that is offered. Their success is undeniable, and that is why Bonafarm Group is invested in shaping the next generation of pig production professionals through sharing their practical knowledge. This is not only beneficial for Bonafarm Group, it also helps raise the quality of pig farming in all of Hungary!
Sold gilts per year
Sold doses of semen per year
Sold finisher pigs per year
PSY
weaned piglets / sow year
kg feed / kg gain feed conversion
lean meat percentage
Since 2016, Bonafarm Agriculture has owned two multiplier farms and an AI station. To keep up with the market needs, Bonafarm Agriculture has recently opened a third multiplication with 4,000 sows, which is expected to reach full capacity in 2022.
In addition to this, the pig farming division also produce slaughter pigs. All piglets are either raised in Bonafarm Group’s own finisher farms or at capable, long-term integration partners. By 2022 Swine Farm Bonagroup expect to produce 750,000 pigs per year!
We switched to DanBred in 2015. Back then, we had DanBred Landrace sows and DanBred Yorkshire boars, but in 2018 we switched to DanBred Yorkshire as our dam line, which is still the structure we work with to this day.
Bonafarm Agriculture decided on this switch because the slaughterhouse prefer that you use only one type of genetics. We did have DanBred before 2015, but just a smaller part of our production. So, in order for our slaughter pigs to always live up to the same high standards, we had to choose one type of genetics. And we found that DanBred was the best for both pig production and slaughter pigs!
We’ve seen a great increase in the feed conversion, which I know is also something that DanBred is focusing on. We can literally see the improvements for this month by month! We’ve also experienced an increase in daily gain, and we can produce a much higher number of piglets than before.
To give you a concrete example: back then, we weaned 27-27.5 piglets per sow per year, but right now our average, without the multiplier farms, is 34.5 piglets per sow per year. And our best farms can actually wean 40 pigs per sow per year! This has improved our productivity immensely. The larger number of piglets has not caused issues for us as, in our experience, the DanBred sows can nurse more piglets than they have teats for.
The high quality of our pigs is why our customers choose to buy them from us – this is the most important aspect for them, and this is where we’re doing really well. We don’t lose any partners; once they’ve bought gilts from us one time, they usually come back and want to buy from us again and again. That’s actually why we’ve decided, with consultancy from DanBred, to create our third multiplication – we simply don’t have enough gilts.
Knowledge sharing is an important component in our business, and we are open about our results; because we have multiplication farms we share all of our pure line results. We have a GenePro agreement which gives us access to the DanBred data bank, where we can follow the genetic progress for our herd. We frequently use this to track how we’re doing and compare our results to other herds. This is a big motivation for us, because we find it important for our multiplication farms to be in the top ten!
On top of that, we encourage our colleagues to participate in as many of DanBred’s webinars as they want, and a lot of our colleagues choose to participate and gain valuable insights this way.
Finally, we are of course continuously in touch with quite a lot of the experts from DanBred, for example about our AI station and the third multiplication; to get the support we need and for them to follow our latest initiatives.
We work together with two universities, a veterinary university and an agricultural university, where we teach online presentation series on how to work in a modern pig production. And these presentations are not only for the students at the universities, they are open for everyone.
We teach the participants how we do our job, and we’ve actually seen quite a big interest in this. They can’t learn the same at the university, and our teachings are much more practical. We aim to explain to them how what they learn at the university actually works in practice. And we truly believe this creates value for them and ultimately result in a higher quality working capacity in the Hungarian pig industry!
Bonafarm Group is a coordinated and controlled vertical integration of producers, always ensuring that all products meet the consumers’ expectations towards the modern food industry.
The group consists of five agricultural companies (crop production, fodder production, grape production (vineyards), and animal husbandry) and, together with two strategic partners, five food industry companies (meat processing, milk processing, poultry processing, processed meat production, and wine production). The main production sites are spread across western and southern Hungary.
On a farm in Denmark, Henrik Nielsen buys marzipan pigs from Mette Hjort. The pigs are among the top 25% on several parameters compared to
DanBred will take its usual place at EuroTier in Hanover in mid-November. Here, particularly the DanBred Duroc-breed will occupy a prominent place at our booth.
Large litters presuppose that the milk glands are functional at farrowing. It is annoying when a sow farrows many good piglets but cannot nurse all
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