| | Improved water efficiency, reduced costs for water pumping and manure spreading, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and improved barn management – Dennis McKerracher has achieved all this by simply changing the drinkers for his pigs.
“I wanted to see if converting [from regular nipple drinkers] to ball-bite nipple drinkers would equate to economic and environmental benefits,” explains McKerracher, who is an Alberta Pork delegate and a member of AESA Council.
With a ball-bite drinker, the pig has to close its mouth right around the drinker to get water, resulting in much less water spillage in comparison to a regular nipple drinker. Part of McKerracher’s motivation for the project was to conserve water because it is such an important resource for ensuring healthy pigs. In addition, he knows that wasted water costs money. There’s the extra cost of pumping that water to the drinkers. And, since the spilled water drips through the slatted barn floor into the manure pit below, there’s the extra cost to pump the increased volume of manure diluted by the spilled water. And there’s the extra cost to transport and apply the increased manure volume. As well, there’s the cost to the environment of the greenhouse gas emissions related to the energy for pumping, transporting and spreading.
So McKerracher worked with Climate Change Central, the Canadian Pork Council (with funding from the national Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program for Canadian Agriculture), and Alberta Pork to set up a year-long comparison trial of the two drinkers at his hog operation near High River. They installed two pulse meters, one for each test group, to very accurately measure water flow. They also installed a control monitor for recording water consumption per head every day.
Every eight weeks they brought in a new batch of 500 grower pigs, with a total of six batches from August 2004 to September 2005. Each pair 4of test groups had the same number of male and female pigs, and the same group weights going in. None of the pigs had been on either type of drinker before the trial. The two groups were housed in separate rooms with separate manure storage.
Both groups of pigs performed equally well in terms of weight gain, but “the difference in water usage was just astounding,” says McKerracher.
He explains, “One drinker serves 15 pigs. One ball-bite drinker reduces water use per pig by at least 2 litres per day [this amount is the minimum in the winter months]. Each drinker is used for 344 days per year, allowing for barn clean-out times between batches. That would equate to 10,320 litres saved per drinker per year. And that 10,320 litres of water is about how much the manure in the pit below the nipple drinker group is diluted by.” Even though the manure from the ball-bite pens is less diluted, McKerracher has had no problems in pumping out the pits.
Recording the daily water use produced an unexpected benefit. “We became familiar with the normal water use curve for each group, so if there was any difference in that curve, we could investigate and see if anything was awry. For example, if there was something different with the feed or if a nipple was leaking a bit, we knew immediately,” notes McKerracher. “Now the first thing we do when we check on the pigs is to check the water use.” He adds, “If a producer were using a water medication to address a specific concern, the amount would be calculated with greater accuracy.”
McKerracher says currently a regular nipple costs $6.90, while a ball-bite nipple costs $12.60. But those extra costs are soon recovered. “The savings on electricity for pumping the water will pay for the conversion to ball-bite drinkers in a couple of years. If you factored in the savings on manure spreading, you could pay for the conversion even sooner. That’s not even including the value of the carbon credit offset.”
He plans to work with Climate Change Central to analyze how much less energy is required for the ball-bite drinker system and the implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from hog operations.
McKerracher is now converting his whole barn to ball-bite drinkers. He says, “This project is more than affordable, it’s profitable. And it’s a simple little thing, so it’s really easy to have uptake from grass-roots producers.” |
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