Article in Pig World article 040412

(click picture to view article)

Astute @ Pig & Poultry 2012

Astute will attendt the Pig & Poultry 2012 15 - 16 May 2012, Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire.

We are excited to present our new S50 ESF outdoor feeder!

Opening our Evaluation facility in the Midlands UK

How do you introduce your product to the market in a straightforward, no nonsense way?

The answer is to establish a representative group of sows and keep them in a similar situation to that of a larger commercial enterprise.

This is what we have done at Hinton House, our UK headquarters in Northamptonshire. Centrally located and easily accessible to the motorway network we are within three hours of a large percentage of the national breeding herd.

Hopefully that will mean the curious and interested will make the trip to see us and appreciate the benefits and savings of installing an S50ESF system on their own farms.

Our first task in establishing the demonstration unit was to fence and secure the site. The paddock we chose runs roughly north/south and slopes gently in the same way. At just over five hectares it has allowed us to subdivide into five smaller areas. The soil is a medium heavy loam over limestone brash and as such is perhaps a little heavier than we would have liked however, with five enclosures we should be able to rotate them and minimize heavy poaching.

In addition, we have a further area of about a hectare that comprises a spinney containing a mixture of hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn sloe, crab apple and rough grazing. It is here in the shelter of the trees that we sited our arks.

Our fencing is a mixture of pig netting and two strand electric with a number of electric gates to allow for movement within the set up. With no water on site we rigged a small reservoir tank and low pressure trough that has to be filled every seven days or so from a bowser.

With the site stock proof we placed our the feeder on level ground adjacent to the spinney and established the wireless link to the office about 400m away. Now all we needed were some pigs.

In discussion with BPEX knowledge transfer manager Colin Stone, we decided to opt for a some cull sows, our rationale being while we did not want to breed from our girls, we wanted animals that are similar to those found on a commercial unit.

We duly found a dozen sows of varying ages and weights that were being culled from a local indoor unit where they had been fed liquid feed through an ESF system. These duly arrived in November last year spending a few days acclimatizing to the outdoor life before getting down to clearing the underfloor of the spinney and hoovering up the remaining crab apples from what had been a bumper harvest.

Their awareness of mechanical feeding was probably a factor in their quick acceptance of the S50 unit and within two days or so the whole group were using the feeder which was great to see in such a short space of time. To encourage the sows to utilize the feeder we set it up to provide ad lib rations throughout the day. Once they were happy with that idea we were able to start rationing on an individual basis.

The next step is to appraise the market of our demonstration site and start inviting potential customers and interested parties to come and see the set up in action. We will be doing this from the beginning of March so if you are interested to make the trip to see what we are up to, please get in touch.

We will participate at NutriFair, Fredericia, Denmark on the 25'th - 26'th of January 2012

Astute will participate at this years first large fair. We will present our first look at the indoor vertion of our ESF system.

Visit us at booth 1451 and see the world premiere!