Modelling the links between farm characteristics, respiratory health and pig production traits

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.