Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scientific evidence remains equivocal with regard to what is the best way to house gestating sows. However, 9 U.S. states have joined the precedent of the European Union and instituted legislation to phase out the use of gestational stalls. Concurrently, sixty or more large national companies in the retail and food service industry have pledged to eliminate gestation stalls from their supply chain over a 5 to 10 yr time horizon. Several packers have also committed to moving some or all of their company owned sows out of stalls and in some instances have also signaled a similar intention for those that supply them with fat hogs. Furthermore, in Canada, a new code of practice was released in July of 2014 that also places restrictions on the use of gestation stalls. Thus, if a producer plans to build new sow facilities and/or plans to stay in the business long enough to recapitalize their existing sow facilities, they will likely need to confront the decision about whether to continue to work with gestation stalls or explore what is the best option for pen gestation. While many producers are expressing concern, anxiety, and even anger today given the possibility of having to transition from gestation stalls to pen gestation, the goal of this paper is to address some of the possible upside potential available from selected pen gestation options. In particular, electronic sow feeding (ESF) provides the opportunity to capture many advantages previously unrealized in the feeding and management of gestating sows. Individual sows are uniquely and electronically identified with a radio-frequency-identification (RFID) tag. Sows enter the feed station one at a time, their tag is read and they are fed their specified allotment for the day. ESF is the only alternative to gestation stalls that provides true individual animal nutrition. However, this paper will make the argument that ESF is actually a better way to feed an individual sow than a gestation stall. In particular, ESF provides unique opportunities for managing the gestating sow through improved approaches to feed utilization, meeting her nutritional needs, estrus control, individual animal care, and autogenous immunization. Specific examples of each of these opportunities will be discussed in detail.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".