Pig Fencing: What Actually Holds a Pig
Pig fencing fails in ways that surprise people coming from other livestock. A pig does not test a fence by leaning on it or jumping it. It tests the ground underneath, the gap at the corner, and the moment the gate latch is loose — and it is patient.…
How Much Space Do Pigs Need?
How much space do pigs need is the first question that has to be answered before a single board gets cut, because everything else—feeder placement, shelter size, how often you move them—follows from it. Most of the figures circulating online are not…
Pig Artificial Insemination: Timing, Technique, and Where It Fails
Pig artificial insemination is the practice of depositing boar semen in the female’s reproductive tract by hand rather than through natural mating, and it is the dominant breeding method on U.S. commercial farms. Most failures trace to three things…
Commercial Pig Breeding Cycle: Days, Intervals, and Where Schedules Slip
The commercial pig breeding cycle is a repeating sequence of four intervals—service, gestation, lactation, and return to estrus—and the length of that sequence, not the size of any single litter, determines how many pigs a sow farm produces in a year.…
Feeding Pregnant and Lactating Sows: Two Phases, One Continuous Decision
Feeding pregnant and lactating sows is often treated as two separate jobs with two separate feed tags, but the number you put in front of a sow during gestation largely decides how much she will eat while nursing. If you overfeed her in gestation, she…
Feeding Weaned Piglets: The First 60 Hours and What Comes After
Feeding weaned piglets is less about choosing the right bag and more about getting a pig to eat at all in the days after it leaves the sow. A weaned piglet is a young pig transitioning from sow’s milk to a solid nursery diet during a period when…
Pig Water Quality: Thresholds, Testing, and Where Water Actually Goes Wrong
Pig water quality is the chemical, physical, and microbiological condition of the drinking water available to pigs at the drinker. It covers source chemistry, contamination, and the condition of the delivery system that carries water from the well to the…
Commercial Pig Feed Management: Cutting Waste and Feed Cost
Commercial pig feed management is the set of decisions that determine how much of the feed you buy actually becomes pork — and on most finishing sites, that gap is worth more than any ration change. Feed is the largest single cost line in pork…
Contract Pig Farming in the USA: How Grower Contracts Actually Work
Contract pig farming is the arrangement behind most of the hogs raised in the United States today, and it works differently from the independent production model many new producers still picture. Understanding it matters before you borrow against a barn.…
Smart Pig Farming: What the Technology Measures and What It Decides
Smart pig farming is easier to sell than it is to deploy. Walk any trade show floor and you will find ear tags that promise individual health alerts, cameras that claim to weigh pigs without a scale, and dashboards that turn a barn into a live feed of…