Gray, H, Friel, M, Goold, C et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Modelling the links between farm characteristics, respiratory health and pig production traits. Scientific Reports, 11. 13789. ISSN 2045-2322
Abstract
Sustainable livestock production requires links between farm characteristics, animal performance and animal health to be recognised and understood. In the pig industry, respiratory disease is prevalent, and has negative health, welfare and economic consequences. We used national-level carcass inspection data from the Food Standards Agency to identify associations between pig respiratory disease, farm characteristics (housing type and number of source farms), and pig performance (mortality, average daily weight gain, back fat and carcass weight) from 49 all in/all out grow-to-finish farms. We took a confirmatory approach by pre-registering our hypotheses and used Bayesian multi-level modelling to quantify the uncertainty in our estimates. The study findings showed that acquiring growing pigs from multiple sources was associated with higher respiratory condition prevalence. Higher prevalence of respiratory conditions was linked with higher mortality, and lower average daily weight gain, back fat and pig carcass weight. Our results support previous literature using a range of data sources. In conclusion, we find that meat inspection data are more valuable at a finer resolution than has been previously indicated and could be a useful tool in monitoring batch-level pig health in the future.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BBSRC (Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council) BB/N020790/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Jun 2021 11:17 |
Last Modified: | 13 Sep 2023 14:49 |
Published Version: | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93027-9 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-021-93027-9 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:175261 |