PHOTO: MICHAEL WERNING, SUS
PHOTO: MICHAEL WERNING, SUS
PHOTO: DORTHEASMINDE
FARM VISIT ▶▶▶
Aiming for higher litter homogeneity
Danish swine producer Søren Kjær Poulsen has a strong focus on multiplication of Landrace pigs. With his experienced staff and a new protein strategy, he achieves top performance as well as high levels of animal health.
BY MICHAEL WERNING, SUS, GERMANY S Profile
Name: Søren Kjær Poulsen, owner (left); Marlene Svensmark, farm manager (right). Location: Lunderskov, Denmark. Farm: Dortheasminde is a breeding farm with 850 sows, among which are 160 purebred Landrace sows. The farm also has 280ha of arable land, growing its own rapeseed and grains as raw materials for feed. The farm employs nine people permanently.
øren Kjær Poulsen, located in Lunderskov, Denmark, is counted among Denmark’s most successful Dan- Bred breeders in Denmark. With around 850 pure- bred sows, of which 160 are Landrace, he breeds
around 26,000 piglets/year at his farm Dortheasminde. Pouls- en says, “Our breeding production can be divided into rough- ly 2,000 gilts with pure Landrace genetics and 8,000 cross- bred gilts, which we sell to Danish and German piglet rearers. On top of that there are boars for the studs.” Roughly 10,000 mostly male animals will be finished by Poulsen himself. The remainder will be sent to different farms.
He is running the farm, which also has 280 hectares of arable land, with his wife Lone and nine employees. He says, “The basis for our success has been our well-trained staff, who have learned how to perform as a team, and the shared conviction to continue to grow.”
Three sites Poulsen started up his business in the 1990s with 250 free- range sows. In 2002, Poulsen and his wife decided to con- struct a conventional facility for 650 sows in Lunderskov, western Denmark. In the years that followed, an insemination room was added to the Dortheasminde farm site as well as a grower facility at a second location, leading to the current size of 850 sows. In addition, a finishing site with over 3,000 places can be rented. “Both the grower and the finisher sites are within 3 kilo- metres of the main facility, so it is easy to make working schedules,” Poulsen says. In order to optimise animal care, and to operate the pig houses efficiently, the employees have been given individual production areas. Farm manager Marlene Svensmark has been working for Poulsen for almost 20 years. Focusing mostly on the day-to- day managing of the farm, she is the owners’ first point of contact inside the pig houses.
A strong team Both have a strong network in the Danish pig industry. Dur- ing work meetings as well as in Facebook or WhatsApp groups, they intensively exchange thoughts and ideas with other farm owners and pig farm managers, putting everything on the table.”
A major theme in these discussions is always how to recruit and keep good farm staff. Svensmark says, “I’m proud that we have hardly any trouble finding employees and that several in our team have been working here for almost ten years.” Her boss nods, and says with a smile: “When we renovated the sow houses in 2015, our employees had to find a different job for a few months. But as soon as the sows were back on site again, all our employees returned as well.” Apart from basic things like decent pay and sufficient holi- days, Poulsen and Svensmark also attach value to a pleasant working environment in the pig house. Every day there is a team meeting, where the to-do list is discussed and evaluations made.
18 ▶PIG PROGRESS | Volume 36, No. 9, 2020
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