With the complexities involved in running a successful hog farm, it can be a daunting task to get everything done in the time you need from birth of the animal to taking it to market for sale. Because of this, pig sorting scales have grown in popularity for livestock owners over the years.
There are the practical considerations of space, pens and feedlots set-up, personnel, feed, transportation, health maintenance (including vet bills, food, water, air circulation, supplements, room), which can make this an extremely difficult task to get the hog from being born to being a valuable sale commodity.
The invention of the sorting scale has been a huge boon to running a viable farm. It vastly improves your successes at market by lower the time needed to successfully feed and maintain the pig’s weight. Using alleys that individually sort the pigs for weighing, and then sending them to the appropriate feedlot is one way to aid in faster growth of the animal, and less time needed from you. The pig is individually weighed, and a determination is made based on the findings as to whether the pig needs more food and nutrients or less, or whether the pig is doing just fine within your timelines.
Without the time that’s needed to sort hogs by hand, you increase the efficiency with which you get an animal to sale. You’re decreasing your personnel overhead, and cutting down on time spent doing anything but getting the pig to the perfect weight for the highest price. You save on personnel time and training, the time no longer being necessary to teach someone to visually sort and classify each pig. The outdated system of eyeballing an animal and guessing at its weight is replaced by the essential technology that lets you either see the data on a screen on-site, or take it with you on a memory stick to review later. It may also be sent automatically to a local computer, or over the Internet to a central data system. You can better budget your feed money, and schedule health visits, saving you time in the rearing of the animals.
You can customize these scales to send the pig to up to five different areas, greatly reducing the time needed to visually sort the animals. A sorter can also be used to tell if pigs are at market weight of need to go back to the feeding pens for a time. You can tell if a pig needs to have food withheld prior to market sale, or if it needs more electrolyte water to reduce water shrinkage and to boost its weight and health just prior to market.
The sorter can be customized for visual separation of a sick animal, allowing it to be put in a separate pen for health maintenance. Similarly, pigs that are underweight can be automatically diverted to a pen where there’s higher-calorie, more nutrient-dense food. The weight being the indicator of progress, thinner pigs will be fattened up quicker, reducing the time you spend getting them ready for market.
Way back when, the way to conduct an animal ranch operation was kind of scattershot. You’d let the animals out to pasture at the beginning of spring, let them wander around for months and then collect them later. Pigs roamed at will, eating wherever and whatever they pleased. Larger hogs only got larger, because they forced smaller ones out of the way.
As any farmer knows, pig weights can fluctuate wildly if the animal is not carefully monitored and fed. Accurate weight measurements are essential to the administration of feed, nutritional supplements, and medications. Plus, an accurate reading of weight gives you an idea of the direction you’re heading before you get the animal to market. There is a narrow window considered ideal to sell the animal at the greatest profit, so it’s essential that you know beforehand what to expect. You must also ensure that you are budgeting appropriately for feed and medical care of your herd.
rtance of accurately weighing your pigs is obvious: overweight or underweight animals cost you money at market, with bonuses being lost or penalties being fixed for undesired-weight pigs. However good you or your staff is at guessing pig weight, you can never be sure of the weight of each individual animal without a good scale.
Well-Designed Pig Sorting Scales Reduce Stress and Injury to Animals
Sorting scales and directed walkways go a long way to ensuring the safety and health of your animals. They also help with personnel safety, lowering the interaction needed to safely weigh the livestock. Weighing, being such a crucial factor in profit prediction, health maintenance and budgeting, make it imperative that you have in place an operation that allows for individual weighing of your animals. This limited human involvement will also reduce stress to each individual animal, making it healthier and calmer.
The barns and pens themselves can be very stressful environments for pigs, housed as they often are in crowded conditions, sometimes dominated by a controlling “alpha” animal. It can lead to fighting and agitation, causing injuries to your valuable livestock. A further stressor can come at sorting time, when animals are typically pushed together into a pen, then manually sorted according to approximated weight-guessing. The risks to health of both people and animals are raised when there’s manual sorting, putting lighter pigs back into the feeding rotation, and market-ready pigs onto trucks. Eliminating the hand-sorting element makes for a safer barn.
Well-designed pens, sorters and scales can reduce the time needed to complete the task, and greatly reduce chances for injury to people or animals. Animal-friendly design provides for a safer, more efficient operation, with padded alleys, open framing, open, more comfortable matted flooring, rounded edges…each element creating a safer environment for all involved. The pigs are herded into a single-file line and trapped singly on a weighing scale. The data is fed to a computer, which then gives a readout, available on-site or saved to a USB memory stick. The animals are calmer because they’re not overcrowded and there’s less chance of them injuring themselves if they’re not panicking. Low profiles on the scales themselves offer the animals more assurance and a steadier step up, calming them and making them easier to manage.
Safety concerns also occur when you or your staff must handle fighting or aggression, or when overcrowding puts you and the animals at risk of waste contamination and disease spread. The losses can be economically devastating, as well as demoralizing to you, your personnel and your livestock. Single-file entry into the weighing area gives separation, enabling the animal to become calm and the worker to do his job more efficiently and safely. Once each pig is sorted, it can go to the appropriate feeding pen or holding pen, and livestock owners can make decisions about feed or slaughter with better accuracy.