DanBred Case: Spøttrup

It’s a piglet production. We have two sow units, one with 1,150 sows and one with 970 sows. We get DanBred Hybrid YL gilts delivered at 16-24 weeks as well as DanBred Duroc boars, and we collect semen from the boars ourselves. We utilise the advantages of DanBred’s breeding progress by having a clear strategy for replacement.

We’ve seen DanBred’s breeding progress for large litters of vital piglets clearly in our production. In year 2000, we could wean 30 pigs per sow per year, now, we can wean almost 45!

Well, aside from the breeding progress, management is key. Survival is our fundamental goal; we want all our animals to live. The more lives we save the better – for animal welfare and for our profit. So, we take extremely good care of the piglets in the first few days of their lives.

We benefit from focusing most of our efforts on the farrowing unit. And the efforts pay off later in the piglet’s life, where less time and efforts are needed.

In our experience, the extra efforts we put in around farrowing, we save later on in the pig’s life, where everything runs more smoothly because we distribute our strengths well.

Actually, these results are achieved with quite simple management routines, as I said, it’s about those little things. So, we have to be detail-oriented.

We have five fulltime employees at each sow unit, and everyone has their own, specific tasks and responsibilities. It’s not hard to manage the pigs, it’s simply about learning the routines – and the results are worth it.

As I just mentioned, we focus a lot on the farrowings. We always want to improve the piglet survival, and we want to make sure our efforts pay off on the number of weaned piglets. At the moment, we wean almost 19 pigs per litter.

For example, in collaboration with SEGES Innovation, we have recently employed a night shift to help out when we have a lot of sows farrowing at the same time. We usually have around 900 weaned pigs a week, and we hope the extra support will lead to even higher survival. 

They’re alfa omega. We have very good people, and they’ve worked here for a long time. Not everyone had experience with pig production, before coming here, but they learn. Even though, we all have our different focus areas and tasks, we work together as a team.

This is definitely important for the very good results we have.