The adage is that you can live three weeks without food, but only three days without water.
The latest round of hot weather has highlighted this even further than is usually the case, with pigs drinking additionally to keep cool, where they cannot wallow.
The importance of water is further highlighted when you consider that about 80% of a newborn piglet and 55% of a finisher pig is water.
Its importance is never more evident than in the farrowing house, where it takes roughly three litres of clean water to produce one litre of milk, without considering the additional amount for maintenance, as well as water required for cooling.
Pigs have a limited ability to sweat. There isn’t, in fact, much evidence to back up the saying ‘sweating like a pig’ – the only place where they lose much heat from evaporation is their nose.
They rely on wallowing and laying in wet environments for temperature regulation far more than sweating.
We also have to consider the water quality where supplementary milk is in use. These products are made up of 80-85% water and are fed to some of a farm’s most vulnerable animals.
The adding of milk protein and sugars to this water can make the perfect environment to grow bacteria.
Without good hygiene, either via automated or manual cleaning, serious issues can arise.
It is also becoming more and more widespread for pharmaceutical companies to provide vaccines via the oral route in drinking water, based on the assumption that what makes up 99.9% of the delivery system in the form of water is clean.
Clean means free of biofilm, bacteria and residues from acids or antibiotics, which often use a sugar base to allow for solubility.
The other side to this is that water is not analysed nearly as closely as feed. If you had one lot of dusty/mouldy or out-of-specification feed, you would immediately take a sample and request analysis, depending on the size of the unit.
This would be days, rather than weeks of supply, compared to the water, which is out of sight and out of mind inside the pipes, with problems sometimes going undetected for months, if not years.
It is worth considering getting your water tested more regularly than required and also checking that flows are sufficient, as a finisher will drink up to six litres a day, with low flows limiting feed intakes much more than anything else. Even nursery pigs require two litres a day.
An easy guide is that if a pig is drinking for more than 15-20 seconds, this could suggest that the flow rate is too low, with pigs getting bored of drinking and therefore limiting their overall feed intake.
