An overview of Irish pig production, research and knowledge transfer since 1960

Abstract

Pig production in Ireland has gone through enormous changes during the past 60 yr, from pigs being primarily produced as a sideline on dairy farms, to an industry with one of the highest average herd sizes in Europe. This happened in part due to external pressure on the industry, whereby economies of scale were needed to compete with pigs produced in other countries, but largely due to the instigation of national programmes to support the pig industry through research, education and knowledge transfer. These efforts helped producers to take advantage of genetic improvements and monitor their own performance over time, as well as allowing for benchmarking of the national herd against other countries. The research programme initiated in the 1960s continues to grow and expand, providing the pig industry with internationally renowned data and knowledge in the areas of nutrition, animal welfare, the environment and energy use. Recent initiatives such as the establishment of the Teagasc and Irish Farmers Association Pig Joint Programme, and a Pig Health Check section in Animal Health Ireland, will help to promote further cross-collaboration between stakeholders in the pig industry, and enable it to rise to the challenges of the years ahead.

Welfare of pigs on farm

“…However, farrowing crates typically offer even closer confinement then gestation stalls. Boyle et al (2002b) showed that even when sows had previous experience of farrowing crates they showed lying difficulties during the first two hours on re-introduction to crates, making on average three attempts before lying down successfully. Similarly, Bonde et al (2004) found that 41% of sows in farrowing crates in 10 commercial herds showed lying difficulties.…”

“…Finally, it is worth mentioning that 5-20% of lameness is due to claw lesions (Dewey et al, 1993) Sows kept in confined conditions during lactation are often affected by injuries at weaning which occurred due to movement restrictions and bodily contact with fixtures and fittings (i.e. farrowing crates) (Boyle et al, 2002b;Bonde et al, 2004;Schmitt et al, 2019;Maschat et al, 2020). The latter authors recommend keeping the confined period around farrowing as short as possible to minimise injuries to sows (Maschat et al, 2020).…”

“…When first moved into a farrowing crate, animals may experience acute stress as a response to confinement particularly for gilts kept in groups during pregnancy (Boyle et al., 2002b). This was clearly shown for gilts by an increase in blood cortisol (Lawrence et al., 1994) but the limited evidence for multiparous sows indicates that they do not experience acute stress when moved into the farrowing crate possibly because they have experience of them (Boyle et al., 2002).…”

Analysis of the Nexus between Structural and Climate Changes in EU Pig Farming

“…In Italy, the environmental impact is related to the specialisation in production of heavy pigs, which requires a longer fattening period and restricted feeding compared to production in other European countries [34]. Over the investigated period, competitive large-scale export-orientated pig farming in Ireland benefitted from new Asian markets [35] but ASF-induced benefits have an undesired impact on the environmental dimension.…”

“…The study by [17] argues that the EU pig farming has a higher global warming potential (CO 2 e) compared to US pig farming due to dependence on imported soybeans from Brazil and Argentina, as these countries change land use and destroy forests in order to benefit from the situation. As feed represents about 70.0% of production costs [35], the development of financially attractive short feed supply chains could solve two important problems, namely reduce the reliance on imported protein and reduce GHGEs. The most recent academic studies deal with the aforementioned research niche.…”