Re-designing the farrowing environment from first principles to optimise animal welfare and economic performance (PIGSAFE)
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Research partners: Newcastle University, SAC
Industrial partners: BPEX, QMS, RSPCA, Defra
Duration: April 2008 – March 2011
The PIGSAFE Project (Piglet and Sow Alternative Farrowing Environment) has the objective of developing and testing a practical non-crate system for indoor farrowing accommodation. Such an alternative must reconcile the behavioural needs of the sow with good piglet survival and farm practicality, including acceptable capital and running cost and ease of daily management.
Following a review of more than 350 articles in the scientific, technical and industry literature, and extensive discussions with a wide range of scientists and stakeholders, a prototype pen was designed and 12 of these, with variations currently under test, have been built at each of the Newcastle and SAC pig research farms. The prototype design involves a nest area with sloping walls, against which the sow can slide more slowly to ground level for suckling to lower the risk of piglets being trapped and killed. A heated creep area is readily accessible from this nest. A lockable feeding crate for the sow is included at one side of the pen, facilitating safe inspection or treatment of the litter. Outside the nest, there is a slatted dunging area to reduce labour needed to maintain hygiene. Around this basic prototype, a series of different design and management combinations is being tested, with “new build” and “conversion” scenarios being trialled at SAC and Newcastle respectively. These include different amounts of space and nesting substrate.
It should be emphasised that this prototype is still in the development stage, and pen design and management are still being fine tuned in the light of experience. However, results to date from 121 litters (21% gilt litters) across the two sites are promising. We are still looking for improvement from refinements, since one of the test designs has proven to give poorer piglet survival and will be modified before the commercial evaluation phase. This will start in 2010, when the refined prototypes will be run by farm staff side-by-side with the farrowing crate systems on the same farm. The construction costs, labour requirements and levels of performance achieved in the two systems will then be used to carry out a full economic evaluation.
*Exact performance figures will be available later in the year and will be reported in next year’s annual report.