Animals giving birth can be tricky business, no matter the circumstances. But the problems that one may encounter go up exponentially during the winter months.
Tales of sows not producing enough milk, piglets not being able to muster the energy to find that liquid gold colostrum, farmers bringing the little ones inside to get warmed up, only to find themselves then bottle feeding piglets for weeks on end…we’ve really heard it all.
Luckily, except for some dramatic moments where we resorted to dunking hypothermic piglets into warm water to get their core body temps up, we’ve never encountered anything like the situations I mentioned above.
We’ve come up with some creative solutions over the years to keep everyone safe and sound though. The game-changing solution for wintertime farrowing that came to us last year and that we’re relying on heavily these days is to make sure it doesn’t feel like winter in the winter!
When we can make it feel like they’re living in SoCal – even just the low 50s to 60s works – we’re safe. The piglets hit the ground, and instead of putting their energy into warming up, they find their spot in the lineup and get nursing right away.
Loss does occur, and it comes to us in various forms, but preventing hypothermia in the first place is our key to successful wintertime farrowing.
We were presented with a new wintertime challenge recently though, which was how to impart all the lessons learned over the years to our employee who was tasked with overseeing not just one but two deliveries while we were out of town for my recent hip surgery.
Months of preparation and training have been happening behind the scenes around here, gearing us up for passing the baton and the great responsibility of ushering new life into the world to our trusted employee, Amanda. A first for all of us.
I’m beyond thrilled to report back and share that even with both sows giving birth on her watch and them both occurring in the middle of the night, when it tends to be much colder (and thus more dangerous), all is well!!
We have 17 new piglets on the farm that were born during the most challenging time of the year, while we were away. And that’s an enormous breakthrough for us all!
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg
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