Fermentation beds have many inherent drawbacks; caution is needed when applying them
Fermentation beds have many inherent drawbacks! Caution is needed when applying them
This post was last edited by xueyoumi on 2009-9-9 21:21
Fermentation bed - a term every pig farmer is familiar with. I am tired of those advertisement-style posts about fermentation beds, all saying the same thing about the advantages of fermentation beds, how good fermentation beds are, how wonderful fermentation beds are...
Are fermentation beds really that good? I doubt it. I have personally used them, experienced them, and conducted comparative experiments. The experimental data and results prove that fermentation beds cannot increase the economic benefits of pig farming. Through application, I found that fermentation beds have many inherent drawbacks, especially in large-scale pig farms, where these drawbacks are even more obvious.
1. Reduced stocking density leads to increased pig house costs and land costs. Fermentation bed technology requires reduced stocking density, with each pig needing 1.5 sq m of space, while large-scale, intensive pig farms can maintain a density of 1 sq m per pig. For farmers with just a few or a few dozen pigs, this is not a problem, but for large pig farms, the problem is significant. In large pig farms, with reduced stocking density, if you want to maintain inventory and slaughter numbers, you must expand the pig houses, which requires more land. This increases pig house costs and land costs.
2. Fermentation bed pig houses cannot fully implement disinfection and epidemic prevention procedures. Chemical disinfectants and antibiotic drugs cannot be used inside fermentation bed pig houses. However, large-scale pig farming is facing increasingly severe and complex threats from diseases, with viral infections, secondary bacterial infections, and mixed infections becoming more and more serious. Facing complex epidemics, can the probiotics in the fermentation bed and the temperature of the fermentation bed body solve the problem??? Facts prove that probiotics have little effect on suppressing viruses. So once an epidemic breaks out, if disinfectants and antibacterial drugs cannot be used, the consequences are unimaginable. Especially for large-scale pig farms, due to the large scale and high density of pig farming, implementing strict disinfection procedures and strict biosecurity measures is an important guarantee for ensuring pig herd safety and stable production. But fermentation beds do not allow disinfection of pig houses - what should be done???? Although the core temperature of the fermentation bed body is 50°C, which has a killing effect on most bacteria, what about the surface? The surface is only around 25°C - can it kill bacteria? Relying on probiotics on the surface to kill them? Can probiotics deal with viruses? Relying on fermentation bed temperature and probiotics to suppress and kill harmful bacteria and viruses is nothing but a pipe dream. Don't tell me to lay plastic film on the fermentation bed bedding and then disinfect - this method is absurd and very troublesome! How do you lay film when there are pigs in the house? Don't the film costs count? This also increases costs, right? Also don't say you can disinfect without spraying disinfectant on the bedding. Just disinfecting the walkways - how effective can it be without disinfecting the inner walls of the pig house? If you don't disinfect the inner walls of the pig house, won't many bacteria and viruses breed on the inner walls? When pathogens reach a certain number, won't it easily cause pigs to get sick?
3. The bedding material resource problem cannot be avoided! For small-scale rural household farmers, solving the bedding material resource problem is still relatively easy, but for large-scale pig farms, the problem is huge. Our farm has over 20,000 pigs in inventory. Calculating at this rate, with each pig occupying 1.5 sq m (sows also counted at 1.5 sq m per head), we would need over 30,000 sq m of pig houses. With bedding at 60 cm thickness, we would need 18,000 cubic meters of bedding material. With such a huge demand for bedding material, how do we solve this? This is not something that can be solved by just adapting to local conditions.
4. The pen utilization rate of fermentation beds is low, which is not conducive to the production needs of large-scale pig farms. Generally, large-scale pig farms implement all-in/all-out, washing pens after pigs are removed, disinfecting, and drying for one week before bringing in new pigs. But what about fermentation beds? After pigs are removed from fermentation bed pig houses, the bedding must be piled up and re-fermented for 15 days to 1 month before new pigs can be brought in. Why do you ignore the economic losses caused by this wasted time???? This greatly reduces the utilization rate of pig houses, invisibly increasing pig house costs.
5. Fermentation bed pig farming cannot achieve the all-in/all-out effect. Why? This is mainly because fermentation bed pig houses cannot be washed after pigs are removed, and chemical disinfectants cannot be used to disinfect the pig houses. Also, after the pig house has been in use, due to pig activity, a layer of grime forms on the inner walls of the pig house. This grime is mainly pig manure, pig saliva, and other debris. This grime contains organic matter and certainly contains many harmful bacteria, viruses, etc. If this grime cannot be cleaned and disinfected, then the next batch of pigs will easily be infected and get sick after entering. Pig farmers all know the importance of all-in/all-out, so if you want to apply fermentation beds, think it through before acting. Don't be fooled by overwhelming propaganda, otherwise serious consequences may occur.
6. The temperature and humidity of fermentation beds are difficult to control at an ideal level. Especially in the summer in the south, fermentation bed pig houses easily develop high-temperature and high-humidity environments. How to solve this? Install high-power fans? Install water curtain cooling systems? Spray water on the roof? Mist spray? Did you count the cost of these measures? If so, how can you say fermentation beds save costs? Is the electricity cost for cooling low?
7. Fermentation bed pig farming is very labor-intensive!!! I say this from personal experience, backed by data.
If, according to some materials, each keeper raises 800-1,000 pigs, and calculating at 1.5 sq m per pig, this keeper would need to maintain a fermentation bed area of 1,500 sq m. 1 mu = 666.67 sq m, so this keeper would need to maintain 2.25 mu of bedding. It is hard to imagine - a farmer using an ox to plow 2 mu of field takes about 3 hours, but one person would need to use a shovel and rake to turn over an area of 2.25 mu shovel by shovel every other day, and deeply bury concentrated pig manure. Is this amount of labor small? How can this amount of labor be called labor-saving? According to our personal experience during the experiment, turning bedding is more physically demanding than shoveling pig manure, and the keepers also reported that managing fermentation bed pigs is more tiring. Perhaps a small excavator could be used to turn the bedding, but calculating at our company's inventory of 20,000 pigs, at least 20 small excavators would be needed. How does such an investment save money? And the maintenance and consumption costs of small excavators are also not a small sum.
Adding and filling bedding material in fermentation bed pig houses, as well as cleaning up the bedding after reaching its service life, is a huge project. In our fermentation bed experiment, when adding bedding material, for a fermentation bed pig house housing only 200 finishing pigs, we hired 4 people who worked for two days to finish adding and filling the bedding. At 40 yuan per person per day, this required an additional 320 yuan in labor costs beyond the keeper's wages. If our entire farm used fermentation beds, with the previously calculated 18,000 cubic meters of bedding material, what a huge project loading and cleaning would be!
Those who say fermentation beds save labor - come talk after you have personally experienced it.
8. Saying that pigs raised on fermentation beds can sell for a better price, with prices 10% higher? This is currently just wishful thinking; in reality, pig buyers will not pay you extra.
First, the price given by pig buyers is based on the market price, and then determined by the pig's coat, body shape, etc. No matter what method is used to raise pigs, as long as they are healthy, not much difference can be seen in coat and body shape, so the price cannot differ much either. Moreover, ordinary pig houses can also produce pigs with glossy coats and excellent body shape.
Second, you say your pigs are raised without antibiotics, pollution-free, with good pork quality, etc., and you want to sell at a higher price. The problem is that these advantages cannot be seen with the naked eye at all, so shrewd pig buyers will not take the risk of paying more to buy pigs.
Third, most pig buyers who come to pig farms to buy pigs are just reselling live pigs and are not involved in pork trading and processing. From this point of view, most pig buyers do not care much about pork quality, whether it is contaminated, whether antibiotics were used, etc. So asking for a higher price when selling pigs is just fantasy.
The above are some of my possibly immature views. If there is anything wrong, please criticize and correct me.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the original poster, each has its own merits.
--------------------------------------
What the original poster said is very practical. Everything has its two sides. You can't just talk about the good side.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the person above, hehehe
--------------------------------------
Let the suicide squad go first...............
--------------------------------------
That's just how it is. I've used it too.
--------------------------------------
The original poster's opinion hits the nail on the head and is very targeted. Someone here tried it, and I also considered several of these points and did not adopt it.
--------------------------------------
Everything has two sides; there are good aspects and possibly bad ones
The person who created the fermentation bed made contributions in thinking and innovation regarding pig farming concepts
Brought environmental issues to the table and provided a fairly reasonable treatment solution
Gave a destination for manure treatment and ammonia production
In the future, environmental issues will definitely be an unavoidable major obstacle in farming
Besides fermentation bed farming, are there more efficient treatment methods?
The three-stage treatment being promoted in Taiwan, China? The anaerobic treatment and return-to-field or direct return-to-land in Europe and America?
Internationally, there are also many different ways of thinking
But efficiency and cost are still being debated
--------------------------------------
But currently, do we have no other ways to deal with the pollution problem of pig farming? In rural areas, a biogas digester can be built to relieve the pressure pig farming puts on the environment, and large-scale pig farms with financial resources can completely spend money to build a sewage treatment plant combined with a large biogas digester. After treatment, the sewage can reach the standard for irrigation water. In fact, the investment in fermentation bed technology is very large, and the maintenance cost during the period is very high, while the later-stage benefits have no obvious advantage.
So, I hope friends who promote fermentation beds can be a bit more realistic and not just promote the good side (the good side of fermentation beds, as proven by my actual application experiments, is obvious only in environmental protection; fermentation beds have no other advantages). I also hope you will face the shortcomings of fermentation beds directly.
I also really hope pig farmers will respond cautiously on the issue of fermentation beds, and not rush in impulsively.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the person above and the original poster. To solve the environmental pollution problem, building a large biogas digester is better, and energy can also be reused. The only drawback is for power generation - biogas contains a lot of sulfur, and the machine cannot stop; if it stops for a period of time, it rusts.
--------------------------------------
Speechless. But it's always good that someone tries, and there will always be people who try, especially those related to policy.
--------------------------------------
How can disinfectant penetrate 2-meter-deep bedding? 12# Scientific fermentation bed pig farming
Fermentation bed - a term every pig farmer is familiar with. I am tired of those advertisement-style posts about fermentation beds, all saying the same thing about the advantages of fermentation beds, how good fermentation beds are, how wonderful fermentation beds are...
Are fermentation beds really that good? I doubt it. I have personally used them, experienced them, and conducted comparative experiments. The experimental data and results prove that fermentation beds cannot increase the economic benefits of pig farming. Through application, I found that fermentation beds have many inherent drawbacks, especially in large-scale pig farms, where these drawbacks are even more obvious.
1. Reduced stocking density leads to increased pig house costs and land costs. Fermentation bed technology requires reduced stocking density, with each pig needing 1.5 sq m of space, while large-scale, intensive pig farms can maintain a density of 1 sq m per pig. For farmers with just a few or a few dozen pigs, this is not a problem, but for large pig farms, the problem is significant. In large pig farms, with reduced stocking density, if you want to maintain inventory and slaughter numbers, you must expand the pig houses, which requires more land. This increases pig house costs and land costs.
2. Fermentation bed pig houses cannot fully implement disinfection and epidemic prevention procedures. Chemical disinfectants and antibiotic drugs cannot be used inside fermentation bed pig houses. However, large-scale pig farming is facing increasingly severe and complex threats from diseases, with viral infections, secondary bacterial infections, and mixed infections becoming more and more serious. Facing complex epidemics, can the probiotics in the fermentation bed and the temperature of the fermentation bed body solve the problem??? Facts prove that probiotics have little effect on suppressing viruses. So once an epidemic breaks out, if disinfectants and antibacterial drugs cannot be used, the consequences are unimaginable. Especially for large-scale pig farms, due to the large scale and high density of pig farming, implementing strict disinfection procedures and strict biosecurity measures is an important guarantee for ensuring pig herd safety and stable production. But fermentation beds do not allow disinfection of pig houses - what should be done???? Although the core temperature of the fermentation bed body is 50°C, which has a killing effect on most bacteria, what about the surface? The surface is only around 25°C - can it kill bacteria? Relying on probiotics on the surface to kill them? Can probiotics deal with viruses? Relying on fermentation bed temperature and probiotics to suppress and kill harmful bacteria and viruses is nothing but a pipe dream. Don't tell me to lay plastic film on the fermentation bed bedding and then disinfect - this method is absurd and very troublesome! How do you lay film when there are pigs in the house? Don't the film costs count? This also increases costs, right? Also don't say you can disinfect without spraying disinfectant on the bedding. Just disinfecting the walkways - how effective can it be without disinfecting the inner walls of the pig house? If you don't disinfect the inner walls of the pig house, won't many bacteria and viruses breed on the inner walls? When pathogens reach a certain number, won't it easily cause pigs to get sick?
3. The bedding material resource problem cannot be avoided! For small-scale rural household farmers, solving the bedding material resource problem is still relatively easy, but for large-scale pig farms, the problem is huge. Our farm has over 20,000 pigs in inventory. Calculating at this rate, with each pig occupying 1.5 sq m (sows also counted at 1.5 sq m per head), we would need over 30,000 sq m of pig houses. With bedding at 60 cm thickness, we would need 18,000 cubic meters of bedding material. With such a huge demand for bedding material, how do we solve this? This is not something that can be solved by just adapting to local conditions.
4. The pen utilization rate of fermentation beds is low, which is not conducive to the production needs of large-scale pig farms. Generally, large-scale pig farms implement all-in/all-out, washing pens after pigs are removed, disinfecting, and drying for one week before bringing in new pigs. But what about fermentation beds? After pigs are removed from fermentation bed pig houses, the bedding must be piled up and re-fermented for 15 days to 1 month before new pigs can be brought in. Why do you ignore the economic losses caused by this wasted time???? This greatly reduces the utilization rate of pig houses, invisibly increasing pig house costs.
5. Fermentation bed pig farming cannot achieve the all-in/all-out effect. Why? This is mainly because fermentation bed pig houses cannot be washed after pigs are removed, and chemical disinfectants cannot be used to disinfect the pig houses. Also, after the pig house has been in use, due to pig activity, a layer of grime forms on the inner walls of the pig house. This grime is mainly pig manure, pig saliva, and other debris. This grime contains organic matter and certainly contains many harmful bacteria, viruses, etc. If this grime cannot be cleaned and disinfected, then the next batch of pigs will easily be infected and get sick after entering. Pig farmers all know the importance of all-in/all-out, so if you want to apply fermentation beds, think it through before acting. Don't be fooled by overwhelming propaganda, otherwise serious consequences may occur.
6. The temperature and humidity of fermentation beds are difficult to control at an ideal level. Especially in the summer in the south, fermentation bed pig houses easily develop high-temperature and high-humidity environments. How to solve this? Install high-power fans? Install water curtain cooling systems? Spray water on the roof? Mist spray? Did you count the cost of these measures? If so, how can you say fermentation beds save costs? Is the electricity cost for cooling low?
7. Fermentation bed pig farming is very labor-intensive!!! I say this from personal experience, backed by data.
If, according to some materials, each keeper raises 800-1,000 pigs, and calculating at 1.5 sq m per pig, this keeper would need to maintain a fermentation bed area of 1,500 sq m. 1 mu = 666.67 sq m, so this keeper would need to maintain 2.25 mu of bedding. It is hard to imagine - a farmer using an ox to plow 2 mu of field takes about 3 hours, but one person would need to use a shovel and rake to turn over an area of 2.25 mu shovel by shovel every other day, and deeply bury concentrated pig manure. Is this amount of labor small? How can this amount of labor be called labor-saving? According to our personal experience during the experiment, turning bedding is more physically demanding than shoveling pig manure, and the keepers also reported that managing fermentation bed pigs is more tiring. Perhaps a small excavator could be used to turn the bedding, but calculating at our company's inventory of 20,000 pigs, at least 20 small excavators would be needed. How does such an investment save money? And the maintenance and consumption costs of small excavators are also not a small sum.
Adding and filling bedding material in fermentation bed pig houses, as well as cleaning up the bedding after reaching its service life, is a huge project. In our fermentation bed experiment, when adding bedding material, for a fermentation bed pig house housing only 200 finishing pigs, we hired 4 people who worked for two days to finish adding and filling the bedding. At 40 yuan per person per day, this required an additional 320 yuan in labor costs beyond the keeper's wages. If our entire farm used fermentation beds, with the previously calculated 18,000 cubic meters of bedding material, what a huge project loading and cleaning would be!
Those who say fermentation beds save labor - come talk after you have personally experienced it.
8. Saying that pigs raised on fermentation beds can sell for a better price, with prices 10% higher? This is currently just wishful thinking; in reality, pig buyers will not pay you extra.
First, the price given by pig buyers is based on the market price, and then determined by the pig's coat, body shape, etc. No matter what method is used to raise pigs, as long as they are healthy, not much difference can be seen in coat and body shape, so the price cannot differ much either. Moreover, ordinary pig houses can also produce pigs with glossy coats and excellent body shape.
Second, you say your pigs are raised without antibiotics, pollution-free, with good pork quality, etc., and you want to sell at a higher price. The problem is that these advantages cannot be seen with the naked eye at all, so shrewd pig buyers will not take the risk of paying more to buy pigs.
Third, most pig buyers who come to pig farms to buy pigs are just reselling live pigs and are not involved in pork trading and processing. From this point of view, most pig buyers do not care much about pork quality, whether it is contaminated, whether antibiotics were used, etc. So asking for a higher price when selling pigs is just fantasy.
The above are some of my possibly immature views. If there is anything wrong, please criticize and correct me.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the original poster, each has its own merits.
--------------------------------------
What the original poster said is very practical. Everything has its two sides. You can't just talk about the good side.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the person above, hehehe
--------------------------------------
Let the suicide squad go first...............
--------------------------------------
That's just how it is. I've used it too.
--------------------------------------
The original poster's opinion hits the nail on the head and is very targeted. Someone here tried it, and I also considered several of these points and did not adopt it.
--------------------------------------
Everything has two sides; there are good aspects and possibly bad ones
The person who created the fermentation bed made contributions in thinking and innovation regarding pig farming concepts
Brought environmental issues to the table and provided a fairly reasonable treatment solution
Gave a destination for manure treatment and ammonia production
In the future, environmental issues will definitely be an unavoidable major obstacle in farming
Besides fermentation bed farming, are there more efficient treatment methods?
The three-stage treatment being promoted in Taiwan, China? The anaerobic treatment and return-to-field or direct return-to-land in Europe and America?
Internationally, there are also many different ways of thinking
But efficiency and cost are still being debated
--------------------------------------
Quoted from Frog Spirit posted on 2009-9-10 05:35I very much agree with the environmental advantages of fermentation beds, but so far, the most obvious advantage I can find in fermentation bed technology is environmental protection. In terms of efficiency, cost, and so on, fermentation beds have no advantage.
Everything has two sides; there are good aspects and possibly bad ones
The person who created the fermentation bed made contributions in thinking and innovation regarding pig farming concepts
Brought environmental issues to the table and provided a fairly reasonable treatment solution
Gave a destination for manure treatment and ammonia production
In the future, environmental issues will definitely be unavoidable in farming
But currently, do we have no other ways to deal with the pollution problem of pig farming? In rural areas, a biogas digester can be built to relieve the pressure pig farming puts on the environment, and large-scale pig farms with financial resources can completely spend money to build a sewage treatment plant combined with a large biogas digester. After treatment, the sewage can reach the standard for irrigation water. In fact, the investment in fermentation bed technology is very large, and the maintenance cost during the period is very high, while the later-stage benefits have no obvious advantage.
So, I hope friends who promote fermentation beds can be a bit more realistic and not just promote the good side (the good side of fermentation beds, as proven by my actual application experiments, is obvious only in environmental protection; fermentation beds have no other advantages). I also hope you will face the shortcomings of fermentation beds directly.
I also really hope pig farmers will respond cautiously on the issue of fermentation beds, and not rush in impulsively.
--------------------------------------
Agree with the person above and the original poster. To solve the environmental pollution problem, building a large biogas digester is better, and energy can also be reused. The only drawback is for power generation - biogas contains a lot of sulfur, and the machine cannot stop; if it stops for a period of time, it rusts.
--------------------------------------
Speechless. But it's always good that someone tries, and there will always be people who try, especially those related to policy.
--------------------------------------
How can disinfectant penetrate 2-meter-deep bedding? 12# Scientific fermentation bed pig farming