NCERA089: Swine Production Management to Enhance Animal Welfare
Statement of Issues and Justification
Pork production systems continue to evolve in the United States and globally as they have for decades. Evolution in the swine industry is driven by the development, evaluation, and implementation of new technologies. The progression from development to implementation of a new technology cannot be completed without the middle step, evaluation. New technologies can be evaluated in various ways by many different entities within the swine industry. Large, coordinated pork production systems can evaluate a technology within their production system and determine whether the technology is valuable. Typically, these results are not public information. Commercial companies can evaluate management practices and technologies on their client's operations but the results may be viewed as biased or not relevant to producers in other regions of the country. In addition, independent pork producers can evaluate a technology on their operation but often do not have the expertise, time, or equipment to conduct a scientifically valid study.The NCERA-89 committee focuses on applied swine management issues related to animal welfare and performance that provide an unbiased evaluation of new technologies for all pork producers. These research projects focus on all aspects of the swine industry from the sow to the finishing pig. The committee is very proactive toward identifying the critical swine production, management, and animal welfare issues in the swine industry that require and clearly benefit from a multi-state research approach. The NCERA-89 committee works more on the basis of exchanging ideas or issues and how the committee might address these through collaborative research and extension projects. The committee discusses numerous swine industry-related issues that need rapid attention, protocols are developed to solve these issues, and conducted on a regional basis without being restricted to specific experimental designs.
Committee members represent a broad discipline base with specific technical and research training in nutrition, facility design and ventilation, economics, animal behavior, and genetics. The variety of disciplines and viewpoints of the committee members allows thorough understanding of the complex production issues. Cooperative, coordinated research among experiment stations permits evaluation of technologies in different research units located in various parts of the U.S. and Canada. In addition, the majority of committee members are experienced extension educators that are actively involved in state and national educational program development and delivery.
The NCERA-89 committee has a long history of conducting successful cooperative research and reporting these research results to stakeholder groups. Much of the research findings reported by the NCERA-89 committee have been implemented in the United States and globally such as the recommended pig space requirement for outstanding animal performance which is supported by many welfare and pork organizations; the feeding management practices of lactating sows using a stepwise process; the utilization of better designed feeders and drinkers that maximize normal animal behavior; the water management and usage recommendations of pigs; fiber utilization in sow diets to enhance animal welfare; and the effectiveness of proper pig mixing and sorting during the growing period. These are just a few of the science-based research findings that the NCERA-89 committee has reported that changed many management practices in the swine industry. The committee continues to challenge the industry and producers to be better animal stewards. This all happens in an enjoyable, thought-provoking manner that stimulates committee members and fosters cooperation among states and countries.
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