It's a hog's life: a cooling shower after an afternoon's rooting

Monday, August 5, 2013

In one of Germany's top swine research facilities, a standard pen for 50 hogs has been redesigned to give a cost-efficient, low-labour comfort compartment with novel extras to keep animals peacefully occupied

by NORMAN DUNN

Catering for a standard of hog housing that should meet every wish from the European animal welfare lobby is a German team developing a 50-head pen where the animals can root in straw – and even cool off under a shower activated by the hogs themselves.

But costs have been kept to a minimum, and so have labour requirements. Researchers at Haus Düsse Research and Training Centre for Agriculture (VBZL) started their "Comfort Compartment" project about a year ago with three main aims: the welfare-based introductions had to fit into a standard pen which requires one square metre per hog at slaughterweight; any additional equipment had to be easily fitted in; and the whole thing had to be affordable. These concepts are also being tried in smaller 25-head pens by the research centre.

There's also the attractive goal of better weight gain. Nothing's been calculated in this direction yet. But first signs are that the hogs involved tend to be less aggressive, a good indication in this respect.

A key factor in the comfort compartment design is the use of layout to manipulate hog behaviour towards maintaining a clean, hygienic and low-labour pen environment. For instance, the entire floor is slatted, but the lying area is more comfortable with narrower slat spacings (10 per cent of floor area). The rest of the floor features European-standard 15 per cent spacings.

Keeping dung out of the lying area is crucial to the project's success and the VBZL team reckons the high standards of comfort in the lying area should help here. But it's recognised that hogs lying around in the dunging area mean those deprived of entry there quickly start excreting all over the pen.

To move the dunging area loungers out, this corner is being made as undesirable as possible. First of all it's small – only four per cent of total pen floor space. Its flooring is cast iron grating and an intermittent water jet keeps the partly screened-off area permanently damp.

Of course, no feeder needs to be told that hogs almost always do the opposite of what you want them to do and the Haus Düsse researchers' experience is no different in this respect. They find that some swine are still lounging on the wet and cold metal grating. Currently, cold air is being channelled onto the grating in another effort to keep the hogs on the move.

Any occupation similar to natural behaviour is a proven way of lowering aggression in pens and in this case a so-called "rooting tower" is part of the design. This was developed and constructed in the research centre and features a simple 30-centimetre diameter plastic pipe suspended perpendicularly on top of a circular trough. The tower is filled with straw chopped into lengths of four to five centimetres.

When pushed by the hogs' snouts, the pipe swings a little and the hogs can pull out some of the straw from the small gap between pipe and trough. This offers the kind of activities that are very like natural rooting behaviour and the first year's tests confirm that hogs gather round the tower regularly, tugging out straw and chewing it. The rooting tower holds around 10 kilograms of chopped straw, which appears to be enough to keep the whole pen occupied for two or three days. Cost is the equivalent of about C$350.

And the shower? Well, this extra is also reasonably priced, costing about the same as the rooting tower. It's even more futuristic in hog comfort terms because the animals activate the spray themselves, pressing a button with their nose. The resultant spray from two jets is more a fine cooling mist, because it's important that the hogs don't get too wet, say the researchers. A built-in flow clock limits each shower session to six seconds. Then there's a break of 60 seconds before it can be activated once more.

The reason for this fine-tuning is that, once again, certain swine started to hog the shower space. The intermittent water supply is encouraging a better flow of animals through the facility and saving water, too.

Is weight gain performance improved in the new VBZL comfort compartment? This is being looked into by the researchers this year. And there's no doubt that visiting farmers are already impressed by the potential of the comfort compartment. Haus Düsse reports that, even before its official commercial launch, around 80 commercial feeding houses have adopted at least some aspects of the concept.

Keep the curly tail – and collect an extra $19 per hog!
A new wave of swine welfare controls looks like it's breaking over farmers in northern Europe. This time, the state of the European Union (EU) has little to do with the deluge. One scheme is, in fact, offering farmers a bonus equivalent to C$19 per hog for stopping tail docking.

The German-based 8,200-member ProVieh association, which bills itself as against all forms of industrialized livestock production, has already talked with REWE, the country's second-largest food store (15,000 outlets), and leading slaughtering concerns about establishing a premium-paying program for hogs that keep their tails. Branding of the resultant pork is being considered, too.

The great majority of hogs in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain (but not in Britain where only about 50 per cent of farms practise docking) are docked in their first days to prevent tail biting. ProVieh's plan features a national fund contributed to by retailers and slaughterhouses. This will not only finance the farmer bonuses, but also bankroll publicity for the scheme and a farm advisory program as well.

The idea, says ProVieh managing director Stefan Johnigk, is that the participating slaughterhouses should note suppliers with large numbers of docked hogs (or hogs with bitten tails and other fight injuries). Special advisors should be sent out to the farms in question to offer help in reducing tail biting and help change management towards a voluntary non-docking routine.

One important proviso of the above plan is that feeders get their curly tail bonuses independently from slaughterhouse carcass payments. "Otherwise, as we have seen from similar hog welfare bonus schemes, the extra cash is simply added to total payments and rapidly becomes part of the gross price per hog, open to manipulation in future price negotiations," explains Johnigk. "We realize that certain actions in hog production which we, and the general public, see as important welfare steps also mean extra costs for the farmer, costs which have to be compensated for," he adds. "It's therefore crucial that a program like ours be independently assessed and paid for separately."

The commercial swine production sector in Germany says a C$19-a-tail premium is not nearly enough to cover extra costs, mainly through feared increases in hog mortality. ProVieh points out that the resultant "curly tail pork" might reasonably be expected to increase sales of pork and therefore market returns.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the pork processing and marketing sector is going ahead with a more radical welfare-based pork marketing program. And so far no special bonus is offered to participating farmers. The Dutch food retailer association CBL says it wants an agreement between slaughterhouses and farmers that no pork products offered in retail outlets will come from animals who have been docked or had their teeth ground.

On top of this, CBL wants more floor space per animal in rearing and feeding pens (respectively 50 and 25 per cent more than current EU requirements), a minimum suckling period of 28 days and a stop to all castration of male piglets as from January 2014. There's already an EU ban on castration without anesthetic. An official EU stop to all piglet castration is not being enforced until January 2020.

The Hampshire's tasty NG strain gains ground in Europe
In the European swine world, the Hampshire breed has always been on the sidelines compared with the all-conquering progress of Large White (Yorkshire), Landrace, Duroc and, to a lesser extent, Pietrain. Scandinavia doesn't count here because there the Hampshire – at least the Swedish NG strain of the breed – was identified early as a producer of extra-tasty pork and for more than 40 years has enjoyed its own dedicated following of farmers, butchers and processors.

Consumers, too, because the Swedish Hampshire was the first minor breed in Europe (alongside the finger-lickin' German Schwäbisch-Hällisches swine) to be headlined in breed-branded pork products such as "Scan Piggham" Hampshire pork products, which are best sellers in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Northern Genetics Hampshire-sourced meat is marketed there as juicier, having a superior flavour and with roasts that never fail to form a very tasty crust in the oven.

Intensive research at the Danish Meat Research Institute carried out for Scan AB, the then-largest Swedish pork processor, and associated breeding companies such as Nordic Genetics, identified a particular gene configuration (R minus) in the father line resulting in higher-than-normal levels of the sugar glycogen in important muscles. This genetic configuration is believed to impart the special flavour as well as the very popular crust.

Following decades of careful breeding to intensify the line's advantages, NG Hampshire crosses were diverted by Scan AB for production of the brand "Scan Piggham Pork." Through a series of takeovers, the company and the pork brand now belong to one of northern Europe's biggest meat processors, the Finnish HKScan group.

The Hampshire story now moves to the United Kingdom, because the participating companies are in close co-operation with a global breeding company there: JSR Genetics. An agreement signed this spring takes an NG Hampshire nucleus herd over to Britain for the first time. Boars from this source will back up a breeding and feeding network developed over the past seven years whereby JSR works alongside with British processor Cranwick in production of premium pork joints and other products under the label "Taste the Difference," which is sold exclusively through the supermarket chain Sainsbury's (over 1,000 outlets) and guaranteed from NG Hampshire breeding.

An added bonus, says JSR Genetics, is the NG Hampshire's growing reputation as a robust commercial line with boars imparting good growth and efficient feed intake in their offspring.

Germany: the gap between the best and worst performers is widening
Scale of operation is more and more the defining factor for making the most money out of hog feeding in Germany. But tight cost control and great husbandry have to be right behind.

The top performers are selling 5,200 or more slaughter hogs per year and managing returns equivalent to C$100 per hog place after variable costs are deducted. These figures come from one of the country's main hog feeding areas, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), with around 8,400 swine producers, including some 5,000 specializing in feeding or running farrow-to-finish units. The bottom 25 per cent of feeding performers sold an average 2,100 hogs last year and scraped a gross margin of just $55 per feeder place. Fixed costs for all operators levelled out at $75, putting the poorer performers definitely in the red, where this class has been for the last 10 years. Average income per hog place for all producers after variable costs is around $85 in NRW.

But sharp bargaining when buying in big batches of weaners or loads of feed is crucial, too. The size of purchase helps, say the NRW advisers, and this advantage can increase in importance with every extra dollar added to feed prices in the general market.

The NRW average figures from the 2011-2012 financial year showed that the top performers were buying their weaners (25 kilograms) for $0.80 a head less and paying $25.50 a tonne lower prices for big consignments of feed. Purchasing power also means the best feeders in NRW are able to insist on top genetics and the resultant good biological performance boosts their returns even more.

Daily liveweight gain on the 25 per cent best performing enterprises is 29 grams higher than the least successful quarter. The overall average in this respect is 752 grams. Feed conversion is better, too – 1:2.8 against 2.98. Adding all these advantages together means total average savings per slaughter hog stack up to the equivalent of just under $12 in the last financial year.

Quality weaners also usually make for healthier hogs. The top feeder mortality is continually one per cent lower than the average. The good news here is that the NRW top 25 per cent have maintained high physical performance and usually made a good profit over the last 10 years. But the gap between the best and the worst performers is widening. Poor performers are now well below break-even point at the end of every year. This means that a reduction in hog feeding businesses of at least 25 per cent can be expected soon in this region. BP