Improving health and welfare of pigs

The international ERANet CoreOrganic2 project ProPIG has produced a handbook for farmers called 'Improving health and welfare of pigs'. It brings together the expertise of 74 pig producers, consultants, scientists and existing scientific literature in the field of organic pig production.

One of the goals of the ProPIG project was to compare three husbandry systems for organic pigs: indoor with outside run, outdoor and partly outdoor in examples from across Europe, looking into animal welfare and environmental impact.

Organic pig producers from 8 European countries participated in this project. During farm visits, data on farm management, husbandry, feeding, animal health and welfare were collected and compiled in benchmarking reports, serving the farmers as a starting point for setting their goals and implementing strategies for improvement.

The collected improvement strategies (jointly formulated by farmers and scientists), user-friendly checklists and relevant facts from science are now presented in this a handy manual that can support farmers and advisers in the development of an optimal pig production system.

The handbook is also available online, see English, French, German and Czech versions (an Italian version is currently being prepared).

Further information can be found here.

Thank you to Pro-pig for the images.