Multi-centre approach to improve outdoor runs for organic pigs:Preliminary results of on-farm experiments

Summary

Abstract
Within the CORE Organic Cofund project POWER, European stakeholders and scientists identified elements to improve animal welfare and reduce environmental impact in concrete outdoor runs for organic growing-finishing pigs. The selected innovations included 1) roughage, 2) showers, and 3) rooting areas. We evaluated the effectiveness of these innovations on nine commercial organic pig farms in three European countries (Austria, Switzerland and Denmark).
This multi-centre study requires a common approach to ensure the best possible standardisation regarding experimental set-up and data collection whilst acknowledging differences between countries and farms. Assessment protocols including animal-based (clinical and behavioural) indicators were jointly developed. To ensure comparable results, training and inter-observer reliability testing took place in on-farm sessions and via online training and showed acceptable to good agreement.
Preliminary descriptive results of the three experiments are presented for clinical indicators, pig faecal soiling and use of the outdoor run. Most clinical indicators showed a low prevalence across all farms and experiments. For pig soiling, a potential effect was only observed in pigs with access to showers; they were slightly cleaner. The use of outdoor runs was generally high and seemed to be influenced by the improvement measures.
We conclude that multi-centre on-farm studies are suitable for ensuring external validity as an important step in implementing improvement measures. However, the high effort for training and potential trade-offs between the highest possible standardisation and