Winter Farrowing - part 2
Our first experience with winter farrowing did not go as well as hoped. When asked what a pigs gestation period is, the common answer is three months, three weeks and three days at 3:00 in the morning, especially if it is a stormy night. Well, in this case it wasn't a stormy night, but it was a bitter cold night. We went from right around freezing (0 C / 32 F) to -18 C / 0 F in the matter of a few hours.
As you can see Momma had lots and lots of bedding, we started the generator and had the heat lamp on over the piglet creep area, so that Momma couldn't knock it. All seemed to be going great, she had 9 alive and one still born, decent size litter we were very happy. We were keeping a very close eye on Momma and the babies, because of the cold we knew there was a higher risk of losses, or of piglets that weren't doing great and needing extra help.
Within the first couple days she had lost 3 piglets, which is higher than normal losses, but with the cold not completely unexpected. Why couldn't mother nature have cooperated with us, at least a little bit?
By the time the babies were 6 days old, we were down to 3, one was very small and weak so we made the difficult decision to pull the piglets from Momma, and bring them inside.
I know some of you will ask why it was a difficult decision, with the high losses it should have been easy. It wasn't, we believe in raising animals naturally, and unfortunetely that does sometimes involve losing some, but we end up with stronger, more hardy animals in the long run. But in this case mother nature was not playing in our favor and the cold snap showed no sign of giving up.
First step when we got them inside was to get them warmed up, they pretty much immediately went for the wood stove and curled up right under it. The second step was to get them bowl trained. The first step was definetely much easier than the second step, but after a few tries they got the bowl figured out, they are after all pigs and they love to eat.
A couple days later, we lost the smallest one as well, he was very weak and even with all the extra TLC just wasn't strong enough to pull through.
We now have 2 very healthy, very active piglets inside...counting down until we can reintergrate them to the outside world, we don't have any desire to have pigs as house pets.
We will be making some changes for the next round of winter farrowing including splitting the pens / shelters into two and putting the piglet creep in the middle (hopefully adding two sows and the heat lamp in the middle will keep everything warmer) and adding extra straw and less hay (straw has a better insulation factor and stays drier). Hopefully with these changes we will have better results from round two.
