Housing & Biosecurity

A pig house is not shelter. It is a production tool, and every failure in the building shows up as feed wasted, pigs sick, or piglets dead. Before you lay a single block, be clear on what the building has to achieve.

Job 1: Keep pigs in the right temperature range

Pigs have very few functional sweat glands, so they cannot cool themselves by sweating. They cool by lying on cool surfaces, by wallowing, and by panting, and all of those depend on what you build. Adults are comfortable in roughly the high teens to low twenties Celsius, and start suffering heat stress well before a human would; a heavy pregnant sow is under real strain above the high twenties. Heat stress reduces feed intake, slows growth, reduces conception rates and can kill.

At the same time newborn piglets have almost no fat reserve and a huge surface area for their size, and they need a much warmer environment, in the region of 30 to 34 degrees Celsius in the first days of life, dropping gradually as they grow. This is the central problem of the farrowing house: the sow wants it cool and the piglets want it hot, in the same room. The answer is not to compromise on one temperature but to create two zones, which is covered later in this module.

Job 2: Keep pigs dry

A wet pig loses heat fast and a wet floor grows organisms. Damp bedding and standing urine are the main drivers of scours in weaners and of respiratory disease in growers. Every design decision about roof overhang, floor slope and drainage exists to serve this one job.

Job 3: Provide air without draught

Pigs produce ammonia, moisture and dust. Ammonia damages the lining of the airway and opens the door to pneumonia; if you can smell sharp ammonia at pig level, it is too high. So you need continuous air movement. But a cold draught blowing directly onto lying pigs, especially small ones, causes chilling and disease. The rule is air above, no draught at pig level. Open eaves and gable ends, solid or partly solid walls to about the height of a lying pig, and open above that, is the standard smallholder answer and it works.

Job 4: Separate groups

Pigs of different ages and stages need to be apart, for three reasons. Feeding is different at each stage, and mixed groups mean either the small ones are underfed or the big ones are overfed on expensive starter. Disease moves from older carriers to younger susceptible animals, so an all in all out flow through separate pens breaks the cycle. And mixing unfamiliar pigs causes fighting, which costs growth and causes injuries.

Job 5: Let one person work quickly and safely

The house you build is the house you will walk through twice a day for years. Feed must be delivered without climbing into pens. Water must be checkable at a glance. Muck must have somewhere to go without being carried through clean areas. Gates must open the way the pigs move. You should be able to get out of a pen containing a sow without turning your back on her. Bad layout does not just waste time; it makes you skip jobs when you are tired, and the jobs you skip are the ones that keep pigs alive.

Judge your own building

Walk into your pig house at the hottest hour of the day and again at the coldest hour of the night. Stand at pig height. Is it too hot? Can you smell ammonia? Is there a draught on your hand at floor level? Is any part of the floor wet where pigs lie? Each yes is a specific, fixable defect, and fixing it is cheaper than any feed additive you will ever buy.

Overcrowding is the most common and most costly housing fault on smallholder pig farms, and it is invisible because the pigs are alive. Crowded pigs eat less, grow slower, fight more, tail bite, and spread disease faster. The space you save is paid for many times over in feed and mortality.

Floor space by stage

Use these as working figures and give more space rather than less in hot climates, because pigs need room to lie apart to cool.

To use this, multiply. Ten finishers at 0.8 square metres each need 8 square metres of pen, so a pen about 4 metres by 2 metres. Do not fill the pen to the calculation and then add two more pigs because they are small; they will not stay small.

Feeder space

If pigs are fed a restricted ration at set times, every pig must be able to eat at once, or the timid ones get nothing. As a working guide allow roughly 20 to 25 cm of trough length per weaner and around 30 to 35 cm per finisher, and more for sows. If you feed ad lib from a hopper, you can allow several pigs per feeder space, but check the feeder is never empty and never so full that feed spills onto the floor. Feed on the floor is feed in the manure.

Water

Water is the cheapest input and the most commonly neglected. Pigs that cannot drink will not eat, and feed conversion collapses. Provide clean water at all times. Rough daily requirements: a weaner in the region of 2 to 4 litres, a grower or finisher around 5 to 10 litres, a dry sow around 10 to 15 litres, and a lactating sow considerably more, commonly 20 to 30 litres or above in hot weather. Allow at least one working drinker per 10 to 15 pigs, and at least two drinkers in any pen so that a single blockage does not leave the pen dry.

Check flow rate, not just presence. A nipple drinker that drips instead of flowing will not let a pig drink enough, and pigs will queue and give up. Put your hand under every drinker every morning. This one habit is worth more than most things you can buy.

Laying out the unit

1. Run a single feed passage down one side so you feed all pens without entering any of them.
2. Order the pens by age along the flow, with the youngest and most vulnerable animals at the clean end, furthest from the entrance, and finishers nearest the exit and the loading point.
3. Load pigs out at the boundary. Design so that a buyer or trader can collect pigs from a loading point at the edge of the farm without walking into the unit. This is a biosecurity decision made by a builder.
4. Slope floors away from the lying area towards a dunging channel on the outside wall, so urine and washing water never run through where pigs sleep.
5. Leave gates opening in the direction pigs move, and make every pen escapable for a person.

Build in a spare pen. You will need it for a sick animal, for an incoming purchase, or for a sow that farrows earlier than you expected. A unit with no empty pen forces bad decisions.

You do not need an expensive building. You need a correct one. Almost every element can be built from local materials if the principles are respected. The floor is the part you must not compromise on.

The floor

Concrete is strongly preferred for pig floors. Earth floors cannot be cleaned or disinfected, they hold moisture and organisms, and pigs will root them into holes that fill with urine. If you can only afford to concrete one thing, concrete the pig floors.

Get these details right:

• Slope. Roughly 2 to 5 percent fall, which is about 2 to 5 cm of drop per metre, from the lying area towards the dunging area and drain. Too flat and urine sits; too steep and pigs slip and sows struggle to stand.
• Texture. A wood float finish, slightly rough. A glass smooth power floated floor causes slipping, splayed legs in piglets and injuries in sows. A very rough or gritty floor abrades feet and knees, which causes lameness and joint infections. Aim for the texture of a well finished path.
• No pooling. After you cast, pour a bucket of water on the floor. If any water stands, fix it before pigs go in.

If concrete is genuinely impossible, a well rammed and compacted floor topped with plenty of dry bedding, cleaned out and replaced frequently, is the fallback. Understand that it is a compromise and plan to concrete as soon as you can.

Walls

Solid walls, of brick, block, rammed earth or timber, up to roughly 1 to 1.2 metres, then open above with a rail, mesh or slatted poles to the roof. This gives you shelter from draught at pig level and free air movement above. Interior partitions between pens can be lower for weaners and must be higher and stronger for boars and sows. Make walls smooth on the inside so they can be washed, and seal the joint between wall and floor so that muck does not lodge in a crack you cannot clean.

Roof

Iron sheet is the usual choice and it works, but on its own it turns a pig house into an oven. Two fixes matter. First, generous overhang, in the region of 0.5 to 1 metre beyond the wall, which keeps sun and driving rain off the walls and the open upper section. Second, insulation or shading under the sheets: a grass, reed or thatch underlay, or a ceiling of local material, makes a large difference to midday temperature. Grass thatch alone is cooler than iron but harbours vermin and is a fire risk, so it needs maintenance. Orient the long axis of the building so that the sun does not shine directly into the pens for most of the day; in most of the region an east to west long axis works well.

Drainage and manure

Every pen needs a dunging channel or a fall to an outside drain, leading to a collection point, a pit or a compost heap well away from the pens and from any water source. Never let waste run towards a borehole, well, stream or garden that people use, and never let it pool where pigs can reach it. Pig manure is valuable, so a proper collection point pays for itself in crop fertiliser or in sales.

The mistakes that cost money

1. Building too small. Farmers always expand. Leave room and build the foundation for the next section now.
2. Building too far from water. You will carry water twice a day forever.
3. No isolation pen. Build a separate pen, downwind and away from the main unit, for incoming and sick animals.
4. No loading point at the boundary. This forces traders into your unit.
5. Feeding troughs inside the pen only. Put the trough on the passage wall so you can feed from outside.
6. Smooth floor. The most common and most damaging single mistake.

More money is lost in the first week of a piglet's life than anywhere else in pig farming. Pre-weaning mortality commonly runs 10 to 20 percent, and reaches 25 percent or more in poorly managed systems. Roughly half of all liveborn piglet deaths are caused by the sow lying on them. That single fact should shape everything you build for farrowing.

Why crushing happens

A sow weighs well over a hundred kilograms and lies down slowly and without much regard for what is beneath her. A newborn piglet is cold, and the warmest thing in the pen is the sow, so the piglet lies against her and is crushed when she rolls or lies down. Crushing is therefore mostly a temperature problem in disguise. If there is somewhere warmer than the sow, the piglets go there instead, and the losses drop.

The creep area

This is the highest return structure you can build on a pig farm. It is a warm, dry corner of the farrowing pen that piglets can enter and the sow cannot.

• Size: roughly 0.8 to 1 square metre in a corner, enough for the whole litter to lie together.
• Warmth: around 30 to 34 degrees Celsius in the first days, reducing as they grow. An infrared lamp hung safely above the creep is the usual method where there is power. Without power, use a covered box with a low roof to trap the piglets' own body heat, plenty of dry bedding, and a warmed sand bag or brick in the coldest hours. The low ceiling matters more than farmers realise, because it traps warm air.
• Access: a gap or low opening the piglets can pass but the sow cannot.
• Attraction: put the piglets in the creep after their first suckle so they learn where it is.

Anti crush design in the pen

• Farrowing rails. A strong rail or pole fixed along the pen walls, roughly 20 to 25 cm out from the wall and roughly 20 to 25 cm above the floor. When the sow lies against the wall the rail leaves a gap a piglet can escape into. Rails are cheap, can be made from local timber or pipe, and are one of the best value interventions in pig farming.
• Non slip floor. A sow that slips lies down uncontrolled, and piglets that slip cannot get clear and may develop splayed legs.
• No sharp corners or gaps that trap a piglet.
• Farrowing crates confine the sow and cut crushing effectively, but they are expensive and raise welfare concerns. A well built pen with a good creep and rails gets much of the benefit far cheaper.

The farrowing routine

1. Know the date. Service date plus 114 days. Write it on the sow card the day she is served.
2. Move her in about a week before, into a pen cleaned, disinfected and left to dry. She settles, and builds immunity to that pen's organisms which she passes on in her colostrum.
3. Wash her before she goes in, to reduce the worm eggs and dirt she carries in.
4. Be present at farrowing if you can. Supervised farrowings lose fewer piglets. Farrowing usually takes a few hours, with piglets arriving roughly every 15 to 20 minutes. Dry each piglet, clear its nose and mouth, and put it to a teat.
5. Colostrum in the first hours is non negotiable. Piglets are born with almost no immunity and can only absorb antibodies from colostrum in roughly the first day of life. Make sure every piglet suckles early, helping the small ones onto the front teats, which give most milk.
6. Cross foster within the first 24 to 48 hours if one sow has more piglets than teats and another farrowing at the same time has spare teats. After that the teat order is set and fostering rarely works.
7. Iron. Piglets are born with very little iron reserve and sow milk is low in iron. Piglets on concrete with no soil access need iron, usually injected in the first few days, or they become anaemic.
8. Check the sow daily for appetite, temperature and a hard or swollen udder. A sow off feed after farrowing is a serious warning; get veterinary advice.

Biosecurity sounds like a commercial farm word. It is not. On a smallholder farm it is the difference between having pigs next year and not having pigs next year, and almost all of it costs labour and discipline rather than money.

The routes in

Disease arrives on a farm in a small number of ways, and every one of them is controllable.

• New pigs. The single biggest risk. An animal can carry infection without showing anything.
• People. Traders, other pig farmers, neighbours, extension staff, and you yourself coming back from a market or another farm, on boots, hands and clothes.
• Vehicles and equipment. Trader vehicles are the worst because they visit many pig farms. Shared wheelbarrows, buckets, needles and knives also carry infection.
• Feed and water. Especially swill and kitchen or restaurant waste containing pork, which is a well documented route for African Swine Fever.
• Other animals. Dogs, rodents, wild pigs and warthogs, birds, and in some areas soft ticks.
• Dead pigs and manure. Carcasses left uncovered, and manure spread or dumped where pigs and dogs can reach it.

The perimeter

You need a physical boundary around the pigs. It does not need to be expensive: a good fence of local poles and wire or of live hedge, with one gate that is kept shut. Its job is not to stop a determined thief. Its job is to make entry a deliberate act, so that people go to your gate instead of walking through your pens. Put a simple sign on the gate saying no entry to the pig area, and mean it.

The clean and dirty line

Draw an imaginary line at the entrance to your pig area. Outside it is dirty, inside it is clean. Then apply three rules:

1. Dedicated boots and overall inside. Keep a pair of boots that never leave the pig area, and a coat or overall on a hook at the gate. Change at the line. If you cannot afford boots, at least have a disinfectant footbath and use it properly.
2. Footbath that actually works. A footbath full of muddy water disinfects nothing. Organic matter deactivates most disinfectants, so scrape or brush boots clean first, then step in the bath. Change the solution regularly, at least weekly and more often if it is dirty or in the rain, and keep it covered from sun and rain.
3. Visitors do not enter. Deal with traders and buyers at the gate or at a loading point on the boundary. If someone must enter, they use your boots and overall, and they should not have been on another pig farm that day. Keep a visitor book with name, date and where they were before; if disease strikes, that book tells you how it came.

Isolation of new stock

Every pig that comes onto your farm goes into isolation first. No exceptions, including animals returning from a show or a market where they did not sell.

• A separate pen, as far from the main unit as you can manage, ideally downwind, with its own equipment.
• Three to four weeks minimum. Most infections a purchased pig is incubating will show in that time.
• Attend to isolated pigs last, after all your other pigs, then change boots and wash hands before doing anything else.
• Watch daily for coughing, scouring, lameness, reddened skin, loss of appetite or fever. Take a temperature if the animal looks off.
• Deworm and treat as needed during isolation, and only then introduce to the herd.

The daily discipline

Work from the youngest and cleanest animals to the oldest and sickest, never the other way. Do not share needles between pigs unless there is no alternative. Do not lend or borrow equipment between pig farms without cleaning and disinfecting it. Control rodents by keeping feed in sealed containers off the floor and cutting grass around the buildings. Keep dogs out of the pig area entirely. Remove dead pigs promptly and dispose of them by deep burial or burning, never by leaving them out, feeding them to dogs or selling them.

African Swine Fever is the defining disease risk for pig farmers in this region. Everything in the previous lesson exists mainly because of it. You must understand it properly, because there is no product you can buy to fix it after it arrives.

The facts that decide your management

• There is no cure and no vaccine in general commercial use in this region. Treatment does not work. Antibiotics do nothing against it, because it is a virus.
• In naive herds, the acute form kills nearly every infected pig. Losses approaching total are routinely reported in outbreaks.
• It affects only pigs. It does not infect people. That is a reason for calm, not for complacency, and never a reason to sell or eat pigs from an infected herd, because meat carries the virus.
• The virus is extremely tough. It survives long periods in uncooked, chilled, frozen, salted and cured pork, in blood and bone marrow, in feed, on boots, knives and vehicles. This is why pork in swill spreads it so effectively.
• It circulates in warthogs and bushpigs and in soft ticks in parts of the region without those animals appearing sick, so wild pig contact and tick habitat matter where you are near bush.

What it looks like

Suspect African Swine Fever when several pigs sicken and die quickly in a short space of time. Typical signs include high fever, pigs off feed but still drinking, huddling, weakness and reluctance to stand, reddening or purple blotching of the skin on the ears, snout, belly and legs, discharge from eyes and nose, vomiting, diarrhoea that may be bloody, and abortion in pregnant sows. Death often follows within about a week of signs appearing.

None of these signs is unique enough to confirm the disease at the pen. Classical swine fever, erysipelas and severe bacterial septicaemia look similar, and only a laboratory can confirm it. What matters is that you act on suspicion.

What to do on suspicion

1. Stop all movement immediately. No pig leaves, no pig enters, nothing is sold, given away or slaughtered.
2. Report to your veterinary or livestock officer at once. In most countries in the region this is a legally notifiable disease and reporting is a requirement. It is also your route to a diagnosis and to any support available.
3. Keep all visitors out. Nobody enters the pig area.
4. Do not sell or eat sick or dead pigs, and do not feed them to dogs. Selling in a panic is how one farmer's disaster becomes a whole district's.
5. Dispose of carcasses by deep burial or burning, following the instructions of your veterinary officer.
6. Clean and disinfect thoroughly afterwards, removing all organic matter first, and leave the buildings empty for the period your veterinary officer advises. Restocking too early is a common way to lose a second herd.

The specific prevention measures

• Never feed swill containing pork or pork products. If you use kitchen or restaurant waste at all, understand you are taking the highest risk in pig farming. Where regulation permits it, it must be thoroughly boiled, and even then the safest position for a smallholder is simply not to use it.
• Do not let trader vehicles or trader boots into your unit. Load at the boundary.
• Do not buy pigs during a local outbreak, and do not buy from markets when disease is circulating.
• Fence pigs securely away from wild pigs and warthogs if you are near bush, and control soft ticks in cracked walls and floors where they can live; solid, sealed, plastered walls and floors help a great deal in tick areas.
• Keep pigs housed, not free ranging. Free range pigs meeting other pigs, scavenging waste and encountering wild pigs is the classic pattern of spread.

The other diseases to keep out

The same measures reduce the risk of everything else. Foot and mouth disease, classical swine fever where it occurs, erysipelas, mange, worms and respiratory disease all arrive by the same routes: new animals, people, equipment and contact with other pigs. Ask your veterinary officer which vaccines are recommended and available in your district, and follow that schedule.