The 230-sow indoor farrow-to-finish herd at Harper Adams University in England has passed an average of 37 pigs weaned per sow per year in 2026, Pig World reports, after the unit won the National Pig Awards' Herd Productivity Award for the third time and Indoor Pig Producer of the Year for the second. Its manager, Matt Swaine, was named Unit Manager of the Year. The unit has to pay its own way while hosting hundreds of students and many research projects.
For the first nine months of 2026 the herd averaged 17.03 piglets born alive per litter, 15.53 weaned, pre-weaning mortality of 9.21 percent, a weaning weight of 8.5 kg at four weeks and 37.71 pigs weaned per sow per year, up from 34.97 when it first won the productivity award in 2022. The team uses split-suckling, supplementary milk from birth and separate lactation diets for gilts and sows, and handles gilts often from about 40 kg. "A happy, relaxed animal is a productive one," Swaine said.
Evaporative cooling, first fitted in the farrowing rooms, now runs throughout the unit, with fine mist from nozzles just above the air inlets cooling air as fans draw it in. "This summer, we haven't lost a sow or a gilt in gestation or lactation at all," Swaine said, with no heat losses among nursery or finishing pigs and no drop in growth or feed conversion. About 40 percent of most of the installation was paid for by grants from the Farming Equipment and Technology Fund.
After a proof-of-concept trial last year, Harper is starting a follow-up this autumn with ISCleanair Global Solutions, Ricardo Energy and Environment, the University of Nottingham and Defra on a filterless, water-based air-cleaning system inside finishing houses. Over four months it cut ammonia by 40 percent, methane by 34 percent and carbon dioxide by 22 percent, and the nutrient-rich water can be used as liquid fertiliser; Swaine said it runs at a fraction of the cost of filter systems.
A soya-reduction trial comparing a control, a reduced-soya and a zero-soya finishing diet, with rapeseed and sunflower meal as alternative proteins, has so far shown no effect on growth or feed conversion over three batches. "The industry has to reduce its reliance on soya," Swaine said, though about 300 acres would be needed to grow enough rapeseed meal for the herd, and it is unclear whether buyers would pay a premium for such pork.
The unit also wants flexible farrowing pens, which it calculates would need 7 square metres each, but the current site lacks space; in its Nooyen crates, which have a floor that rises and falls with the sow, piglet mortality runs at only 3 to 5 percent.
Photo: Alisha Vargas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Pig World
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