Yorkshire farmers take top three places in national pig competition

The winner of the 1,000 first prize – in the form of vouchers for boar semen – in the Janssen Animal Health Batch Farrower of the Year Awards was Steve Blaken, who has 500 sows at Wormald Green, near Harrogate. He had been second twice in the previous three years.

He said: " From the initiation of the awards scheme four years ago I've striven to win, and I do feel a great sense of achievement.

"We did fine-tune a number of management areas and these have obviously made a difference."

Second place went to Richard Duffield, who has 160 sows on the family-run farm at Husthwaite, and third place to Tim Chapman of Scruton, near Northallerton, who has a 311-sow herd and was the first overall winner in 2006.

Batch farrowing means synchronising the production of piglets, in the interests of efficiency, and Janssen Animal Health supplies pharmaceuticals which help to get sows coming on heat at the same time.

The winners were judged on measures of productivity and pig health.

Steve Blaken scored an average of 26.3 reared pigs out of each sow over 12 months.

Sam Walton, chairman of the judging panel and editor of Pig World, said: "It takes outstanding attention to detail, good management and stockmanship, to repeatedly achieve such good performance."

n The RSPCA is looking for pig producers willing to experiment with free indoor farrowing and/or alternatives to docking as measures against tailbiting.

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