Weaning and the Nursery Stage

There is no single correct weaning age. There is only the weaning age your feed, your housing and your management can support. Weaning too early with the wrong feed and a cold pen costs more than weaning late.

What is actually done

In commercial systems, piglets are commonly weaned between 21 and 28 days. In many smallholder systems in the region, weaning happens later, at around 5 to 8 weeks. Both work. They produce different economics.

The case for earlier weaning (21 to 28 days)

• The sow comes back into heat sooner, so she produces more litters per year. This is the main financial argument.
• The farrowing pen, which is your most expensive pen, is freed up faster.
• The sow loses less body condition in a shorter lactation, if she is fed properly.

What early weaning demands in return

Earlier weaning only pays if you can supply all of the following. If you cannot, do not do it.

• A genuinely good quality starter feed, high in digestible protein and easy on the gut. This is the expensive part.
• A warm, dry, draught free nursery pen. A 21 day old piglet still needs a warm environment.
• Clean water available at all times, at a height and flow the piglet can use.
• Piglets already eating creep feed before weaning.
• Good hygiene, because post weaning scour hits early weaned piglets hardest.

The case for later weaning (5 to 8 weeks)

• The piglet's gut and immune system are more developed, so it copes with solid feed better and scours less.
• You need less specialised and less expensive starter feed, because the piglet can handle a simpler diet.
• Less equipment and less heat needed in the nursery.
• Lower piglet mortality after weaning in low input systems.

The cost of later weaning

• Fewer litters per sow per year, so each sow earns less.
• The sow milks for longer and can lose a lot of body condition, especially on poor feed, which then delays her return to heat anyway.
• Big piglets on a sow damage teats and udders.

Making the decision

Work through this honestly.

1. Can I buy or mix a proper starter feed reliably, every month, at a price I can afford? If no, wean later.
2. Can I keep a nursery pen dry, warm and draught free through the coldest night of the year? If no, wean later.
3. Is my sow losing serious condition by week 5 of lactation? If yes, weaning earlier and feeding her well may serve her better.
4. How many litters per sow per year am I getting now, and what would one extra litter be worth against the extra feed cost? Do the sum with your own prices.

Weight matters more than the calendar

Whatever age you pick, wean on weight and condition as well as date. A piglet that is small, thin and not yet eating creep feed will do badly if it is weaned with the rest simply because the date says so. Hold back the smallest piglets for a few extra days on the sow, or move them to a lighter litter, rather than pushing them out on schedule.

Wean the whole litter at once

Do not take piglets off one or two at a time over a week. Partial weaning drags the sow's return to heat out and keeps the pen occupied. Decide a date, hold back only genuinely unfit piglets, and clear the pen.

Creep feed is solid feed offered to suckling piglets in the creep area, where the sow cannot reach it. Most farmers think its purpose is to add nutrition. That is only partly true. Its main purpose is training.

Why it matters

A piglet's gut is built for milk. It produces the enzymes for milk sugar and milk protein, and very little of what it needs to digest cereal starch and plant protein. Those enzymes only develop with practice, and practice means eating solid feed. A piglet that has never eaten solid feed before weaning day arrives in the nursery with a gut that cannot digest what is in the trough. It goes hungry, its gut lining shrinks, and undigested feed sitting in the gut feeds the bacteria that cause scour.

A piglet that has been eating creep feed for two weeks arrives with a gut that already works. That is the whole point. Total creep feed eaten before weaning is small; the gut adaptation it buys is large.

When to start

Start offering creep feed from about 7 to 10 days of age. Most piglets barely touch it before about 2 weeks, and intake rises in the last week before weaning. If you wean at 21 to 28 days, that gives you a workable training period. If you wean at 6 weeks or later, there is plenty of time and creep feed also starts to make a real nutritional contribution, because sow milk output peaks around 3 weeks and then declines while the piglets keep growing.

How to offer it

1. Small amounts, often. A handful at a time, two or three times a day. Fresh feed attracts piglets; stale feed repels them.
2. Throw the old feed out. Every day, empty and wipe the creep feeder. Feed contaminated with urine, faeces or damp is worse than no feed, and mouldy creep feed will make piglets sick.
3. Shallow, flat feeder. A shallow tray or a flat dish, low enough for a two week old to reach into. A deep bucket does not work.
4. Put it where they already are. Near the creep, in a lit area, on a clean dry surface. Some farmers scatter a little on a clean mat first, because piglets root and explore before they eat.
5. Water beside it. Piglets that start eating solid feed need water. A shallow dish or a low nipple drinker in the creep from about 1 week.

What creep feed should be

Creep feed is the most nutrient dense, most digestible, most expensive feed on the farm per kilogram, and you use very little of it. Do not economise here by feeding grower feed or plain maize meal.

• High digestible protein from good quality sources, with the amino acid lysine well supplied.
• Low fibre. A young piglet cannot handle bulky, fibrous ingredients such as heavy maize bran.
• Fine or small pellet form, palatable, and smelling fresh.
• Bought commercial pig starter is usually the right choice at this stage even if you mix your own feed later, because getting the digestibility right at home is difficult.

Common mistakes

• Putting out a large bowl once and leaving it for three days. It goes stale and mouldy and the piglets learn to avoid the feeder.
• Placing it where the sow can reach it. She will eat all of it.
• Starting at weaning instead of before it. Then the training happens during the crisis, not before it.
• Switching feed abruptly at weaning. Use the same feed for at least the first week after weaning that they were already eating, then change over gradually across several days.

Weaning day removes four things at once: the sow, milk, the familiar pen, and in most cases some litter mates. You cannot avoid all of it, but you can spread the shocks out and cushion them.

Prepare the nursery before you move anything

The pen must be ready and warm before the first piglet enters it. Do this the day before.

1. Clean out, wash, disinfect, and let it dry fully. All in, all out, with a rest between batches if you can manage it.
2. Set the heat and check it with a thermometer at pig level. A piglet weaned at 3 to 4 weeks needs roughly 26 to 28 C at first, dropping by about 2 C per week as it grows. A piglet weaned at 6 to 8 weeks needs less, but still needs a dry draught free lying area.
3. Block draughts at floor level. Draught, not air temperature, is what makes weaners pile and scour.
4. Check every drinker actually flows and is at the right height, roughly at the piglet's shoulder.
5. Put feed in the troughs before the piglets arrive so they find it immediately, and use the same feed they had as creep.

Move the sow, not the piglets, if you can

If your layout allows it, take the sow out and leave the piglets in the farrowing pen for a day or two. That removes only one shock at a time. Where the farrowing pen is needed immediately, move the piglets, but move the whole litter together into a pen already stocked with feed and water.

Timing

• Wean in the morning, so you have the whole day to watch the group and correct problems.
• Avoid weaning on the coldest or wettest day of the week if you have a choice.
• Do not vaccinate, castrate or do any other stressful procedure on weaning day. Space these out.

Grouping and fighting

Pigs establish a rank order by fighting. Fighting costs feed, causes injuries and spreads disease.

• Mix as little as possible. Keeping litters intact is best. If you must mix, mix at weaning, when they are small, rather than later.
• Group by size. Sort the batch into two or three size groups. Putting the smallest with the biggest guarantees the smallest never reach the trough.
• Enough feeder space. Every pig in the pen must be able to eat at once for the first days, or the small ones simply do not.
• Give them something to do. A little clean straw, a hanging sack, a piece of wood or a chain. Bored weaners bite ears and tails.
• Watch the first two hours. This is when serious fighting happens. Be present.

The first 48 hours

• Feed little and often, four or five small meals rather than one big one. A gorging weaner scours.
• Check water flow twice a day. Weaners drink before they eat; a blocked drinker on day one causes a disaster on day three.
• Walk the pen at least three times a day and look at every pig standing up. Any pig that will not get up, has a sunken belly, or stands apart with its head down needs attention now.
• Note the tail. A drooping, dirty tail on a weaner is usually the first sign of trouble.

Do not forget the sow

When you take her piglets away, take her off lactation feed levels but keep her well fed on a good gestation or a flushing ration so she comes back into heat quickly. Move her next to a boar if you have one. Details are in Lesson 6.

Almost every weaned piglet stops growing for a few days, and some lose weight. This is the post weaning growth check. It is normal, but its size is under your control, and it is one of the most expensive things on a pig farm because it delays every pig to market by days or weeks.

What is actually happening

1. The piglet stops eating. For the first day or two after weaning many piglets eat almost nothing. They have lost the smell, sound and routine of the sow and they do not yet associate the trough with food.
2. The gut lining shrinks. The finger like villi that absorb nutrients depend on a constant flow of feed. When feed stops, they shorten within a day or two, and absorption capacity falls.
3. The piglet then over eats. On day two or three hunger wins and it gorges. Now the gut cannot handle the load, undigested feed passes on, and bacteria multiply on it.
4. Scour or setback follows. The piglet is now both underfed and sick.

The chain starts with the empty gut. That is where you break it.

How to shorten the check

• Creep feed before weaning. The single biggest factor. A piglet that already knows what feed is starts eating on day one.
• Same feed across weaning. Do not change diet on the day you change everything else. Keep the creep diet going for at least the first week, then transition over several days.
• Feed in the trough before they arrive. Piglets explore a new pen immediately. Let them find feed while they are exploring.
• Little and often. Four or five small feeds a day for the first week prevents the day three gorge.
• Water first. A piglet will not eat dry feed without water. Check flow rate, height and cleanliness of every drinker. Many post weaning checks are actually a water problem.
• Consider wet or soaked feed for the first days. Mixing feed with clean water to a porridge consistency is closer to milk and encourages intake. Mix fresh each feed and clean the trough afterwards, because soaked feed sours fast in warm weather.
• Warmth. A cold weaner uses feed energy to keep warm instead of to grow, and cold weaners lie piled instead of eating.
• Space and quiet. Overcrowding and constant disturbance both reduce intake.

Measure it

You cannot manage this by feel. Weigh a sample.

1. Weigh 10 piglets individually at weaning. Mark them.
2. Weigh the same 10 at 7 days and at 14 days after weaning.
3. Calculate the average daily gain for week 1 and week 2.

If week one gain is very low or negative and week two is good, you have a classic check and the actions above will pay. If both weeks are poor, look at feed quality, water, temperature and disease rather than at weaning stress.

Do not try to fix it with antibiotics

Routine antibiotic use to cover a growth check masks a management problem, costs money, and drives antibiotic resistance, which is a real and growing risk to both pig farming and human health in the region. Use antibiotics only for diagnosed disease, on veterinary advice, at the correct dose and for the full course, and observe the withdrawal period before slaughter.

Diarrhoea in the first two weeks after weaning is the most common serious disease problem in the nursery. It kills piglets, and the survivors carry a permanent growth penalty.

Why it happens

Weaning removes the protective antibodies in sow milk, changes the feed from milk to cereal, and empties the gut. Undigested feed in the lower gut is food for bacteria, particularly certain strains of E. coli, which multiply and cause the gut to pump water outwards. Add a cold, wet or dirty pen and dirty water and you have created the disease.

Note that this is a management disease. Almost everything that prevents it is free or cheap.

Prevention

• Creep feed before weaning so the gut can digest what it receives.
• Little and often feeding for the first 7 to 10 days.
• Avoid high, poorly digestible protein in the first week after weaning. Excess undigested protein reaching the lower gut feeds the bacteria. Moderate, highly digestible protein is safer than high crude protein from poor sources.
• Clean water, always. Test the flow. Clean the tank and lines. Dirty water is a direct cause.
• Dry, warm, draught free pen. Chilling and wet floors are strongly linked to scour.
• All in, all out with proper cleaning between batches. Continuous flow nurseries build up infection.
• Do not mix age groups. Older pigs shed organisms that younger ones cannot handle.
• Some fibre helps. A modest amount of appropriate fibre in the post weaning diet supports gut function. This is one of the few places where a small inclusion of a bulky ingredient is useful rather than harmful, but it must be clean and finely processed.

Recognising it early

Walk the pen and make every pig stand up. Look for:

• Watery, yellow, grey or pasty faeces on the floor or smeared on tails and hind legs.
• A pig standing apart, head down, hollow flanks, rough coat.
• Sunken eyes and skin that stays tented when you pinch it. These mean dehydration and are urgent.
• Reduced feed intake in the pen as a whole, or feed left in the trough.
• Any sudden death in a well grown weaner is a warning to look hard at the whole pen.

Responding

1. Rehydrate. Dehydration kills, not the diarrhoea itself. Offer clean water and an oral rehydration solution containing salts and glucose. Where a commercial pig electrolyte is available, use it to the label. Make sure sick pigs can physically reach a drinker.
2. Warmth. Move affected pigs to a warm, dry, well bedded area. A scouring pig loses heat fast.
3. Reduce feed load briefly. Cut back to smaller, more frequent meals for a couple of days. Do not starve them for long periods.
4. Separate. Move badly affected pigs to a hospital pen and attend to them last on your round so you do not carry infection back.
5. Call for diagnosis. If more than a few pigs are affected, or any die, get veterinary advice. Different causes need different responses and some scours are not bacterial. Guessing wastes money.
6. Antibiotics only on advice, full course, correct dose, and observe the withdrawal period before any pig is slaughtered.

Then find the cause

After the outbreak, go back through the list: what was the pen temperature at 4 a.m., was there a draught at floor level, did every drinker flow, was the feed changed abruptly, was the pen properly cleaned and dried, were age groups mixed. Fix the one you find. Treating the same outbreak every batch is the most expensive habit in pig farming.

The nursery is where a lot of money is quietly lost. Pigs in this stage are cheap to feed and expensive to lose, and the pen environment does most of the work.

Temperature and air

Continue the ladder. Weaners need roughly 26 to 28 C at 3 to 4 weeks, dropping by about 2 C per week, so by around 20 kg live weight they are comfortable in the low twenties. As they grow, the priority shifts from adding heat to removing moisture and stale air.

• You need air movement without draught. Air should move above pig level, not across the floor where pigs lie.
• Damp is the enemy. If the walls sweat or the bedding is wet in the morning, you have too little ventilation, not too little heat.
• Check at night and at dawn, not at noon. Noon tells you nothing about the coldest hour.

Space and stocking

Overcrowded pens cause fighting, tail biting, scour and poor growth. Space needs increase steeply with weight, so a pen that was right at weaning is too small a month later.

• Every pig must be able to lie flat on its side at the same time without lying on another pig.
• Every pig must be able to reach the feeder. Where feed is offered in meals, they must all eat at once.
• Split pens as pigs grow rather than waiting until they are visibly crowded.

Water

Water is the cheapest input and the most commonly neglected.

• Provide at least one working drinker per 10 to 12 pigs, and at least two per pen so one blockage is not a crisis.
• Set nipple drinkers roughly at the pig's shoulder height and raise them as the pigs grow.
• Check the flow with a cup and your watch. A drinker that drips instead of flowing will not water a pen of weaners.
• Clean the tank. Algae, dust and bird droppings in an open tank are a disease route.

Pen hygiene and routine

• All in, all out by pen or by room where possible: fill, grow, empty, clean, dry, refill.
• Work from youngest pigs to oldest, and visit the hospital pen last.
• Keep boots and a scraper for the nursery that do not go into the farrowing house.
• Weigh a sample every two weeks so you know if growth is on track before the pigs reach market age.

The sow after weaning

The moment the piglets leave, the sow's job changes from milking to getting back in pig, and she has a short window.

• Expect heat in 4 to 7 days after weaning in a sow in good body condition. A sow that has lost heavy condition during lactation will take longer or may not show a clear heat at all, which is the main reason to feed lactating sows properly.
• Keep feeding her well from weaning to service. Cutting her feed the day the piglets go is a common and costly mistake. Generous feeding in this window supports ovulation.
• Boar contact. Move her where she can see, hear and smell a mature boar daily. This brings sows into heat and helps you detect it.
• Heat detection twice a day, morning and evening. Look for a swollen reddened vulva, restlessness, mounting other sows, ears pricked and, definitively, the standing reflex when pressure is applied to her back with a boar nearby.
• Record the weaning date and the service date for every sow. The gap between them, the wean to service interval, is one of the most useful numbers on your farm. A herd average creeping above about a week points at body condition and lactation feeding.
• Check her body condition at weaning. If you can see her hip bones and backbone clearly, she was underfed during lactation, and that will show up as a delayed heat, a small next litter, or both.