Animal board invited review: The need to consider emissions, economics and pig welfare in the transition from farrowing crates to pens with loose lactating sows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the development and implementation of housing systems for pigs, there has been a significant focus on pig welfare including loose housing of lactating sows either indoors or outdoors. However, it is equally important to consider the environmental and economic aspects of housing systems to ensure sustainability in livestock production. The aim of this work was to review the sustainability (societal and animal welfare, environmental and economic impact) of different approaches for housing farrowing and lactating sows in indoor environments. The review illustrates that like outdoor systems, indoor housing systems are challenged in meeting the three pillars of sustainability when changing the housing of lactating sows from conventional crates with permanent confinement to systems with temporary or zero-confinement. Increased space allowance increases sow welfare, but in addition, pen designs with increased space increase ammonia emission, investment and running costs. Furthermore, indoor loose lactation systems come with an increased risk for piglet mortality, which unless effectively managed, reduces animal welfare and the economic sustainability of the system. If farms retrofit existing buildings, the larger space per loose farrowing pen leads to a reduction in pen numbers and therefore herd size, reducing the farm profitability. If farmers choose to reduce herd size to meet requirements, welfare will be reduced while emissions will be increased as more sows are brought into production again in other countries, often in conventional systems with fully slatted flooring, to meet the demand for animal protein to feed the growing global population. The review indicates there are ways to house lactating sows loose indoors with increased opportunity to perform highly motivated species-specific behaviours compared to the conventional crates with continuous confinement. These systems can offer a lower risk for environmental impact and economic risk through reducing piglet mortality. Nevertheless, a trade-off for continual freedom of sow movement may be required as zero-confinement increases the risk of piglet mortality and increased emissions. It is important to raise awareness among citizens and policy makers that loose farrowing and lactating systems if applied today, come with a higher production cost and the risk of increased environmental impact. More research and development is needed in relation to the environmental and economic impact of these systems in order to give farmers the best information to invest in new and more sustainable production systems.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.010 |
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".