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…
Balanced Pig Diet: How Protein, Energy, and Fiber Work Together
A balanced pig diet is not a list of numbers you check off one by one. It’s a set of relationships, and pulling on one moves the others. Make a ration more energy dense, and the pig eats less of it—so it now takes in less protein per day, while the…
Farrow-to-Finish vs. Wean-to-Finish: Which Pig Production System Is Right for You?
Table of Contents Introduction Choosing the right pig production system is one of the most consequential decisions a U.S. pig farmer will make — it determines your capital requirements, biosecurity exposure, labour needs, and, ultimately, your profit…
Inside a Modern Commercial Pig Farm: How Today’s Operations Really Work
Table of Contents Introduction The U.S. swine industry produces over 130 million market hogs annually, and the backbone of that output is the modern commercial pig farm – a highly engineered operation that looks nothing like the family barn of 50 years…
Pig Immunity Nutrition: Requirements, Limits, and What the Evidence Supports
Pig immunity nutrition is the practice of meeting the herd’s nutrient requirements so immune function is not the thing that gets shortchanged when disease pressure arrives. It is not a matter of raising one nutrient above the rest; in at least one…
Pig Parasite Management: What the Label Covers and What It Doesn’t
Pig parasite management combines recognizing the signs, confirming what you are actually dealing with, and knowing what an approved product label does and does not cover before you treat. Parasite problems can persist with little obvious illness,…