Farmscape for October 5, 2005  (Episode 1931)

Research conducted by the Prairie Swine Centre has shown over crowding negatively affects the productivity of small and large groups of pigs equally.

A one year study conducted at the Prairie Swine Centre's Elstow research barn compared groups of 18 pigs to groups of 108 pigs under crowded and uncrowded conditions.

Graduate Student Brandy Street says the focus was to compare the response of large and small groups to crowding.

Clip-Brandy Street-Prairie Swine Centre 

Uncrowded pigs were always performing better than crowded pigs and small group pigs were always performing better than large group pigs but, when we looked at space restriction alone in the large and small groups, the end result of crowding in both groups was the same.

In the large groups the gains were reduced at a much earlier phase than in the small groups however  the reduction in gains was a lot slower than it was in the small groups so, by the end of the study, the gains between the two groups was actually the same.

In terms of health, we didn't see a lot of response of the pigs to crowding at all other than that they had a few more leg sores when they got more crowed probably just because they were restricted in mobility and, being in contact with the floor more, you'd see higher leg lesions.

We also looked at behavior.

When we restricted space, really, the primary thing that was affected was feeding patterns.

The number of meals they took in a day changed as well as the length of a meal and duration to the next meal.

When we looked at stress levels, neither crowding level or group size had an effect on the amount of stress the pigs were experiencing.

Street says, in both cases, the uncrowded groups of pigs outperformed the crowded groups in terms of the amount of feed consumed, feed efficiency and rate of gain.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council