Enriching a sow’s environment is easy, inexpensive and offers a range of benefits. This was made clear by the project “From Innovation to Adoption: On-farm demonstration of Swine Research”, which was led by Ken Engele at Prairie Swine Centre and Geneviève Berthiaume at CDPQ. One aspect of the project examined environmental enrichment and strategies to improve laying areas for gestating sows.
As this project demonstrated, enrichment must be carefully thought out and designed with the pigs in mind. Above all, material should be stimulating and possess a number of other traits in order to gain and hold the user’s interest: destructible, edible, deformable, chewable, odorous and clean.
Though the cost and time involved will vary from farm to farm, enhancing your pigs’ environment is an investment that can pay big dividends in the long run: improved animal performance in areas like feed intake, average daily gain (ADG) and feed conversion ratio (FCR); fewer incidents of abnormal behavior such as biting, tail-biting and aggression; broader range of behaviors; reduced animal stress.
Enrich your pigs, enrich your profits (full article)
