"Good drinking water is just as important as good food. But water is always there and that is why we are more inclined to pay less attention to it", says Wilco Harmsen. He has an organic pig breeding farm with 320 sows. He supplies his piglets to five organic fattening pig farmers.
Last year Wilco Harmsen started focusing more on improving drinking water quality. "There was nothing wrong with it. Periodic surveys of the water never showed disturbing numbers. All indicators were within the bandwidth", says the pig farmer. "Still, not everything went the way I would like it to be. We have water meters for gestating sows and they have shown an average water intake of 8-9 litres per sow per day in recent years. That's on the tight side", he explains.
"We have tried to improve water uptake by installing extra drinking troughs and installing a circulating pump system. However, the sows stopped drinking. "Over the years, Harmsen occasionally used products to clean the water supply system on his farm. Because of the costs and disappointing effect, he stopped doing so. In recent years, he did add acid to the weaned piglets' drinking water to suppress diarrhoea problems.
Too good to be true
Last year, at Nieuwe Oogst, Harmsen read about the Watter System, an installation that continuously adds a disinfectant to the water. "It seemed almost too good to be true. I asked the supplier for names of farmers who work with it and called four: two pig farmers, a dairy farmer and a poultry farmer. They all told enthusiastic stories, so we decided to test it ourselves."
