Students Report from Denmark Day Two

 
 
Pictured here, the students are 1) visiting with Hans Erik Jorgensen about his outdoor pig production 2) learning about the Madsen Greenhouses and 3) enjoying afternoon coffee on the coast.
 
Here is Brandi Merrick's report from Denmark on Day Two:

Everything about Denmark is beautiful- even the hog farms. We started out the
day with a visit to Hans Erik Jørgensen, an organic hog farmer who keeps his
sows outside to farrow. When you first walk out to see the pasture where the
sows are kept, it's like a scene from "the old days." There are piglets running everywhere playing and the sows munch on grass and feed.

Hans keeps each sow in her own fenced grass area and allows the piglets to roam the place until 7 weeks. After 7 weeks the pigs are brought into the grower barns (30 sows weaned per week with 300 pigs), which were very different from most barns in the U.S. Because he is an organic farmer, he is not allowed to have slats so he keeps them on straw beds. The grower pigs also have access to the outdoors via doors in the wall.  The pigs are later transferred to a finishing barn in pens of 400 with auto-sort. He uses the straw beds as fertilizer for his crops. An important thing to note about his farm is that, because it is an organic farm, he is not allowed to use antibiotics or buy fertilizer or feed from non-organic farms. He is, however, allowed to vaccinate and castrate the hogs. Hans weans 20 pigs per sow per year.

After the hog farm, we visited a greenhouse owned by Thomas Offer Madsen. We were informed that the Hoya is one of the main house plants grown in the greenhouse because it is a hardy plant very popular in Denmark and other portions of Europe. It can go for up to two months without water, which makes it very easy to transport over long distances. They also have a starter greenhouse in Poland and in Thailand. They are very adept at putting on wires and shaping the plants into different (sellable) shapes.

We spent a very pleasant lunch at our good friend Ove Gejl Christensen's house talking with Ove and his wife about differences between Danish and English culture.

After lunch we visited Helnæs Hojskole. Helnæs Hojskole is what the Danes call a "folk school," where they teach people of all ages different subjects. Most schools specialize in a certain area, generally either sports, arts, language or agriculture. They also specialize in different age groups, from teenagers, to middle age people to the retired. The folk schools are the only types of schools in Denmark that cost the attendees (all other education is free), and they do not receive a diploma that will further them in the workforce (i.e. they don't say I received this diploma, give me a raise). Most of the time, people attend the folk schools simply to learn because they want to.

For afternoon coffee, we stopped at the sea. It was quite cold, but there were a few brave souls who dared to enter their feet! The weather here so far has been very lovely, but the wind makes things a bit chilly. All in all it was a wonderful place to stop and enjoy a nice cup of coffee and some cake.

We also had several other stops, including Pilegard, a 350-cow dairy farm with four robotic milking stations.  This was a different system and stable design (slatted floor) than we saw the previous night. The farm was half Jersey and half Black & White (Holstein).  This farm is owned by three brothers. They harvesting grass silage and we observed that process as well as a terragator that was injecting manure into the grass stubble. The farmers have another 90-cow dairy farm and a farrow-to-finish operation.  We saw that they have a straw heating unit that provides heat to the hog farm as well as roughly seven residences in the area.