Mother sows are treated like childbearing machines. Their life is an uninterrupted cycle of artificial insemination, pregnancy, farrowing, nursing time and then renewed insemination. A sow can get pregnant two or even three times in a year, with a pregnancy lasting about 114 days, followed by 3-5 weeks of nursing time before the piglets are weaned³. Under natural conditions, piglets would continue to be with their mother until they are gradually weaned at around 4-5 months old.

The problem of weaning before 40 days is actually that the immune system of the piglets is not fully established. The ideal mother-child-bond can only be established if the sow does not have more piglets than teats, which is often not the case in modern breeds (Landrace) who are bred to produce as many piglets as possible, more than the sow can care for. This leads to high mortality rates of underweight piglets usually killed on-farm.

The young females are inseminated for the first time at around 6-8 months. 

In intensive indoor farms, the sow is locked in a crate in a 'mating stall' where she is confined and unable to turn around for up to five days after mating. This way the sow can be inseminated through natural mating (using a boar) or artificially at a specific time point that suits the management of the farm. Usually, farmers want to synchronise a whole group of sows and bring them into heat at the same time, so that they can move all of them to a different compartment in their rotating cycle and all production stages are occupied evenly. Once the sows are inseminated, they are usually put in individual sow stalls, where they stay for at least six weeks. 

Once the weeks of isolation pass, they are released back to the group, until one week before the farrowing starts, where they will once again be isolated and moved to farrowing crates until their piglets are weaned off after 3-5 weeks.

The sow is brought to the farrowing pen about a week before the calculated date of birth. There she is crammed into a metal cage for about 5 weeks (a crate in the farrowing pen) in which she gives birth to about 9-13 piglets, and which she nurses for about three to four weeks in most farms, or even less if the farm practices early weaning. In a natural setting, a week after farrowing, the sow would start to introduce her piglets to the herd, then nurse them for about 4-5 months, while socialising with the herd the rest of the time.

The bars in the farrowing crate separate the mother from her piglets. The piglets can reach the teats of the mother under the rods, but the mother cannot make loving contact with her piglets. After piglets are weaned, the sow is usually almost immediately returned to the breeding centre and back to the insemination crate. It is only during her pregnancy, that she is kept in the group with other (pregnant) sows for a few weeks.

A sow goes through this production cycle until it no longer achieves the desired 'reproductive performance' of an average of about 30 piglets per year. Then she is slaughtered. Most sows only survive this cycle for just a few years. The natural life expectancy of pigs would be much higher.

After public outrage, the Australian Pork Industry committed to phasing out sow stalls by 2017, instead keeping sows in loose housing until a week before birth when they are moved to farrowing crates. Despite these assurances however, investigations in 2022 have revealed that sow stalls are still being used across parts of Australia.

As more people are becoming aware of the cruelty of farrowing crates, the public pressured many food companies across the globe to promise to push back against farrowing crates that are in use for the production of their meat. Between 2012 and 2015, more than 200 food companies, including restaurant chains like McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's have surrendered to the consumer demand for more welfare-friendly production⁶. Most of these companies are expecting to hit their target of crate-free production by 2022, with some already making good on their promise in their EU bases⁷.