Three colours during the gestation. The more visual the easier

Goal

Make the management during the pregnancy easier using different colour spray colours each week to mark the tasks carried out with the sows.

Description

The system will always be used with a weekly batch management, and it consists in using a different colour spray for each week, working with a total of three colours, to mark the sows and show the different tasks carried out with them (mating, return to oestrus, ultrasound scanner, vaccines...). We will start with the mating, so every three weeks we will have to repeat the colour used. In this way, and if we have a weekly action plan during the pregnancy, each week we will know with which batch of sows we will have to work with according to the colour they are marked with and their position in the gestation.

Explanation

We will start with the mating, so on week 1 we will mark all the mated sows with a blue colour spray; on week 2 with a red colour spray and on week 3 with a green colour spray. On week 4 we will have to mark the sows with a blue colour spray again. The previous sows that we have in the farm marked with a blue colour spray are those that were mated three weeks before. This process will repeat itself successively during all the pregnancy period.

The advantage of this system is that, in a very visual form, we will be able to know which batch of sows we have to work with according to the week in which we are carrying out our management. As an example, for a weekly batch of sows we would have the following scheme:

• Week 1: Mating (we use the colour corresponding to that week).
• Week 4 (1+3): Control of the returns to oestrus (the sows that will have to be checked to see if they return to oestrus are those that have been weaned and those marked with the same colour that we have to use during this week, because they will be the sows with options to return to oestrus).
• Week 5 (1+4): We take the sows out to parks and we use the ultrasound scanner on them. These sows will be those that are marked with the colour corresponding to the previous week, because they will have undergone a cycle of 4 weeks.

And we would follow on in the same way until we reach the moment in which we have to take the sows to the farrowing quarters.

In this first image we can see three sows marked with three different colour spray colours. This would tell us that each of them pertains to a different weekly batch. Week 1 would be marked in blue, week 2 in red and week 3 in green.

In this photograph we can see how the following weeks would be marked: on week 4 we would repeat with the blue colour spray, on week 5 with the red colour spray and on week 6 with the green colour spray, and so on.