PHOTO’S: VINCENT TER BEEK
FARM VISIT ▶▶▶
Jointly getting used to the new reality
How can healthy weaner pigs be produced in practice without using high levels of zinc oxide? Danish pig producer Anders Rold teamed up with his local animal nutrition company to figure out what further steps he could take.
PROFILE
Name: Anders Rold, age 46. Function: Owner. Farm: Smorup Toftegaard is a 600 sow farrow-to-grower facility, divided over five units in one building. Every year, the farm sells roughly 22,000 piglets of 30kg to one finisher facility located roughly 30km away from the farm. Rold rents out 110ha of sur- rounding arable land to a dairy producer. Using DanBred genetics, from a Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) herd, his farm weans on aver- age 36.6 piglets/sow/year. Sows are vaccinated against influenza and Glässer’s Disease; the piglets against Porcine circovirus 2. Post-weaning, he achieves an average daily gain of 480–510 g/day. At the time of the visit, post-weaning mortality levels were at 4–5% – a Streptococcus suis infection was influencing that number, which is usually below 3%. The farm has four employees.
BY VINCENT TER BEEK, EDITOR, PIG PROGRESS “B
efore this all started, I expected the remov- al of zinc oxide to have quite an effect on the weaners.” Danish pig producer Anders Rold produces roughly 22,000 piglets of
30kg, so any effect on the weaners would be significant. No surprise then that Rold, like virtually every European pig producer, had at best mixed feelings about the new EU legis- lation banning pharmacological levels of zinc oxide in piglet feed, which will come into effect this summer. Although the reason for the ban may well be justified, it constitutes yet another challenge for pig producers. As if rising feed costs, Covid-19, African Swine Fever, a very unstable geopolitical situation, stringent environmental rules and animal welfare demands weren’t enough to worry about! Rold, however, is looking forward with confidence to the deadline of 1 July; he actually said goodbye to zinc oxide ahead of time, on 1 January 2022. He recalls reflecting on the transition and wondering: “Was this what it all was about? That was no big deal at all.”
The farm First things first – Smorup Toftegaard has only been in the possession of Anders Rold since 2019. After a long career in the swine industry he decided to stop being a farm manager and become a farm owner instead. He bought a farm for roughly 600 sows near the village of Haverslev, located in North Jutland region, Denmark. Using highly prolific DanBred genetics, he is achieving a re- spectable 36.6 weaned piglets per sow per year. He manages this with the use of foster sows – and to accommodate all that he has even added “emergency enlargement” of his lac- tation rooms. Two additional containers make up, in total, 24 extra lactation pens. Quite a lot of farms in Denmark do home mixing – and Rold is no exception. However, he does not grow any cereals but pur- chases these externally. On-farm he will then mix the cereals with premixes supplied by Vilomix, part of Danish Agro.
Project The reason that Rold is relatively relaxed about the transition to weaning without zinc oxide is that he joined a project initi- ated by animal nutrition company Vilomix, with participation
24 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 38, No. 4, 2022
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