Australians are using Maternity Ring technology for housing gestating sows as an alternative to gestation crates which have been attacked by animal welfare organizations and has resulted in some downstream industry bans.
Many North Americans have switched to loose housing, but Dr. George Charbonneau said typically the perception is that the increased behavioural freedom of sows results in an unacceptable level of piglet mortality.
Many of the loose housing farrowing designs have a floor footprint (space) that is often 50 per cent greater than a standard farrowing crate per pen footprint., he wrote on the swineweb website.
This larger footprint continues to be one of the impediments to the adoption of confinement-free farrowing.
The Maternity Ring (MR), is a farrowing system with a similar footprint to a conventional farrowing crate and pen. The Maternity Ring is in use in Australia but its performance, particularly with regard to piglet survival, has not yet been studied in a controlled experiment.
A team of Australian researchers wanted to determine whether piglet mortality differed between farrowing crates and Maternity Rings.
First-parity sows were recruited over 12 months and randomly allocated to one of the two treatments: farrowing crate (FC) and Maternity Ring.
The researchers found:
· There was no difference in total pigs born, pigs born alive, or the number of pigs weaned between the two treatments.
· There was a tendency for a 0.3-pig-per-litter increase in pre-foster mortality in MR sows, but pigs born dead, post-foster deaths, liveborn mortality, and total deaths were similar to FC sows.
· Piglet removal for ill thrift was zero.
· The incidence of medications in sows was six per cent in MR and 15 per cent in FC.
· MR housing achieved comparable liveborn piglet mortality to FC first-parity sows. Future studies should test whether this performance is repeatable as sows are managed across multiple parities.
Charlebois said the reduced medication needs for MR housing offset a slightly higher mortality rate.
He noted that the MR was installed in the same amount of floor space as the conventional farrowing crate and should provide a commercially viable, close-confinement-free option to replace the traditional farrowing crate.
This study examined only first parity sows and would need to be repeated in older parities, he said.
