Leg health, growth and carcass characteristics in growing-finishing pigs of two different genotypes reared on Swedish organic farms

Increased prevalence of joint abnormalities at slaughter among pigs from organically certified herds in Sweden has been reported. Most of these abnormalities are caused by osteochondrosis, which has a genetic background. Thus, we investigated whether changing the sire breed from the commonly used Ha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organic agriculture 2020-03, Vol.10 (1), p.97-103
Main Authors: Wallenbeck, A., Eliasson, C., Lundeheim, N., Nilsson, K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abnormalities
Agriculture
Animal and Dairy Science
Biocompatibility
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedical materials
Commercial farms
Conformation
Environment
Farms
Genotypes
Growth rate
Health
Hogs
Husdjursvetenskap
Leg
Life Sciences
Locomotion
Offspring
Organic farming
Osteochondrosis
Plant Sciences
Slaughter
Suidae
Sustainable agriculture
Sustainable Development
Swine
Weaning
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Summary:Increased prevalence of joint abnormalities at slaughter among pigs from organically certified herds in Sweden has been reported. Most of these abnormalities are caused by osteochondrosis, which has a genetic background. Thus, we investigated whether changing the sire breed from the commonly used Hampshire to the commercially available sire breed Duroc affected joint health and growth rate. We studied 766 commercially reared growing-finishing pigs from insemination of the mother sow until slaughter. The pigs were raised at four commercial organic farms (integrated or externally integrated, and had 40–160 sows in production) and slaughtered at one slaughter plant. We found no significant difference between the offspring of the two sire breeds regarding back conformation, leg conformation, swollen joints, locomotion or lameness at 13 or 24 weeks of age, or regarding joint abnormalities at slaughter. This indicates that clinical leg health will not be improved by changing sire breed. However, the Hampshire-sired pigs had higher daily growth rate ( P  
ISSN:1879-4238
1879-4246
1879-4246
DOI:10.1007/s13165-019-00260-8