Piggery Design
How to influence pigs to make their toilet in a specific place where it is easy to clean:
This is not my piggery ( Picture) but you can see their toilet area up-and-down middle fence (more near water nipple in the bottom corner near the gate)
This area with dung would have been MUCH bigger if you had 30 Porkers in those same pens.
Remedy? - block visibility between pens except for the last 1.5m.
Look - no poos along the left-hand wall - nobody to "talk" to there for pigs.
How to influence where pigs poo in a pen.
Given a choice, pigs poo as far from their food as possible - IF POSSIBLE.
Pigs poo where their water is.
They also poo where they can SEE each other - because they spend lots of time there - talking to the neighbors.
So if you control where they can see each other AND PUT THE WATER NIPPLE (not trough) there and put self-feeders / feed troughs as far as possible from there (or floor-feed in there sleeping area if it is concrete) then you will have a much smaller area to clean every day.
In my very first piggery, I had three big pens with enclosed sleeping areas and big open yards next to each other (like in the picture).
The fences were chain-link wire mesh so they could see each other everywhere.
One day, they made a hole in the fence - as they do - and I fixed it with a sheet of corrugated iron.
The next day I noticed they did not defecate where the iron blocked their view of each other.
I promptly covered the whole fence with iron EXCEPT at the gate.
The next day I just opened the gate and picked up all the poos in 1 square meter instead of having to go into the pen (with 20 pigs in) and clean about 12 square m of poos.
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