Why a SW curly-tails feeder?
Because of future welfare requirements, including the ban on tail docking by 2030 in the Netherlands, we receive many questions about feed widths. For keeping pigs with long tails, various sources indicate that, in addition to issues such as genetics, feed and climate, the accessibility of feeding and drinking areas in particular plays a very large role. By ensuring that a pig's chances of hunger and thirst are as small as possible you remove a major trigger for biting behavior.
How do you ensure as little hunger as possible for the pig?
The quantity and width of the feeding areas are very important here. Pigs want to be able to eat quietly without being disturbed or obstructed by other pigs. Verba dry feeders have standard eating widths of 20 cm for piglets and 30 cm for finishing pigs. This is generous, but the market is also asking that the width of the feedlot should be the shoulder width of the pig plus an additional 10%. For a piglet this is 18 to 19 centimetres, for which the standard VERBA SL dry feeders are more than adequate. For fattening pigs, however, this theory leads to a feed width of 35 cm. Therefore, we had to make an adapted model for the dry feeders for companies that want to work with this.
Which fattening pig feeder did we develop?
The feeder we developed with 35cm wide net eating compartments is the SW feeder. As a nickname, "the curly tail trough." In this SW feeder, the eating areas are always larger than 35 centimeters measured between the side plates.
We have these curly-tailed dry feeders in 8 variations:
SW1100KR (1×1 compartment): external width of 380mm, SW2100KR (1×2 compartments): external width of 740mm, SW3100KR (1×3 compartments): external width of 1095mm, SW4100KR (1×4 compartments): external width of 1450mm. The four double-sided variants have the same width, and are also 1,000mm high.
Options on the SW curly tail feeder
As with all VERBA dry feeders, SW feeders are offered in the standard design. This is a result of over 50 years of in-house production and experience with our comprehensive 7-year warranty on dry feeders. For the last 10 years the dry feeders have not been changed in detail. We find dry feeders generally executed in this way the very best, without becoming excessive in too thick materials, making the price unnecessarily too high. Of course, many people have their own opinions about their desired design. We can almost always accommodate that; you can always ask!
Some of the options we offer with all of our dry pig feeders, including this SW curly tail feeder, are: Spindle adjustment instead of standard slide adjustment, stainless steel bottom slide instead of plastic bottom slide, bolts and nuts instead of pop rivets, lids, mounting angles and u-profiles to include. Stainless steel spindles, stainless steel slide and bolts with nuts instead of rivets have disadvantages compared to our standard versions. We are very happy to explain these to you so that you can make the right choice of feed trough.
