Animal Bytes

Later weaning can significantly boost piglet performance during the immediate post-weaning period, but it will not improve clinical health status.

Breeding could be the key to improved piglet pre-weaning survival in alternative farrowing systems to the crate.

Less ‘active’ sows were more prone to crushing their piglets in a recent trial that looked at the link between sow behaviour and their history of piglet crushing

How water is supplied to growing pigs has no effect on their performance, but it can make a difference when it comes to waste and slurry volume – up to an additional 32 tanker loads, according to a trial recently completed at Hillsborough’s Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute and led by Elizabeth Magowan.

Weaner piglets prefer zinc oxide-free feed because the palatability of feed is reduced by adding the mineral.

Piglet birth weight can influence both prenatal and postnatal mortality rates under outdoor conditions, so genetic approaches to optimise birth weight offers pig breeders and producers an opportunity to improve pig welfare and enterprise profitability.

The challenge facing industrialised countries is to negotiate a long-term global regulatory framework, with intermediate targets, that can reduce greenhouse emissions to a level that limits the increase in global mean surface temperature to 2oC above pre-industrial levels.

Attempts to calculate the large-scale consequences of global warming for agriculture and food production, although difficult, do confirmed that most of the increase in production will come from the agriculture of developed countries, which mostly ‘benefit’ from climate change.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture is a laudable and necessary objective. It should be done, however, in the knowledge that not only will there be ‘disbenefits’ as well as benefits, but also that these ‘disbenefits’ will be compounded by issues relating to competition for resources.

Green house gas (GHG) emissions are highly variable between and within production systems and the optimisation, or management, of animal production systems has not yet been considered so there is room for possible improvement.