Tag: Pigs

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Flow Sensors

How to choose the right one to suit your water dosing task and your Select doser type.

There are a lot of farmers across Australia with a need to add something into the drinking water for their Livestock. Most of these applications have one thing in common: The need for dosing to be automatically adjusted in proportion to the water flow.

When we first launched the Select Doser in Australia about 16 years ago, there were only a couple of options available for Water Flow measurement. We had sensors in our range to measure very small and very high flows, but very little to cover the middle of the range that people encounter on farm.

This meant that our customers in the early years could use the Select Doser for precision applications (such as a Poultry Shed, or Weaners on a pig farm) or Farm-wide applications (such as Water treatment with Chlorine or Peroxide), but didn’t have a good solution for intermediate applications (Dosing a decent sized group of cattle independently, or multiple sheds on a piggery).

As you’ll see below, things have changed. We now have a range of flow measurement devices to cover, not just any flow situation, but also dramatic differences in source water quality.

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Summer Cooling for Australian Pig Farms (Part Two)

Part Two – Drip Cooling

Cooling grower and finisher sheds is fairly easy to get your head around. You install some sprayers, hook them up to a control system (such as our COOLGRO), and move on with your life. This works great with larger pigs in naturally ventilated sheds. The same easy system can be used for dry sows in pen situations.

The harder part of the equation is wherever young pigs are involved, especially in the farrowing house.

Lactating sows like low temperatures (ideally between 12 and 22 degrees Celsius), but piglets like temperatures of 26 – 32 degrees Celsius. Managing these two requirements in a shared environment isn’t hard, but just requires a little forward planning.

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Summer Cooling for Australian Pig Farms (Part One)

Part One – Spray Cooling

Australian summers aren’t what you would call ideal for pigs. Even with the massive variation across the 7.692 million square kilometres of our country, most places are too hot for comfort in the height of summer.

Worse than that, the temperature severely inhibits pigs’ performance. The optimal temperature for Grower pigs (and larger classes such as Finishers, Sows and Boars) is between 16 and 26 degrees Celsius. Every degree above this upper number several impacts their appetite, FCR, growth rate and fertility.

When was the last time you had a summer day below 26 degrees on your farm?

This is nothing new to talk about. Farmers use all kinds of methods to cool their pigs throughout the hotter months, hoping to avoid the dreaded effects of the Aussie summer.

I’m just writing about the one that Think Livestock can help you with.

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Drinking Water: An overlooked threat to farm biosecurity

Of the many steps Australian farmers take to improve the biosecurity of their farms, one significant threat is often not taken seriously enough. The provision of safe, clean drinking water is hugely important to the prosperity of any livestock farm. The costs, in terms of productivity losses and mortality, of not doing so can be astronomical.

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