THEMATIC REPORT: Best Practices Space Allowance & Flooring

Brief literature overview

In the literature review for Work Package 5 on space allowance and flooring, we analyzed scientific literature to provide further insights into the challenges identified under this theme. These challenges were identified by the Regional Networks (RNs) across participating project countries, addressing potential issues in optimizing space allowance and flooring. The review also referenced current EU regulations and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s recommendations for growing pigs.

The purpose of this review was to highlight key points from the challenges that experts in the Thematic Group (TG) should consider when selecting best practices. The review concluded that providing pigs with adequate space and welfare-optimized flooring is achievable, but success requires farm-specific adaptations to housing and management practices, particularly to address the identified challenges.

Challenges

Challenges were collected from Regional Networks across the eight participating countries. The most frequently mentioned challenges related to space allowance and flooring are listed below (ranked from highest to lowest frequency):

• Pig health and welfare
  • Solid floors are more difficult to keep clean (especially in summer) and create issues with hygiene, Salmonella and possibly with other diseases (infectious diseases, lesions, abnormal behaviours…).
• Higher costs
  • Due to investment in existing buildings, lower number of pigs per unit of space (fix cost), more labour required to manage facilities and manure
• Lack of clear rules and policies
  • In relation to the minimum requirements by the EU, labelling regulations and national rules for planning permissions and manure management
• Manure management issues
  • Caused by higher area per pig (potentially more emissions), enrichment creating clogging and new systems required to be installed
• Gaps on knowledge and expertise
  • Lack of knowledge related to designing new facilities, managing environmental conditions of the buildings and managing pigs and manure in these facilities
• Health and safety risk increase
  • Increased need for labour, in particularly for hygiene and manure management

Scoring methodology

The Good Practices collected by the RNs under the theme of space allowance and flooring were presented to the Thematic Group (TG) experts for scoring. Each practice was evaluated based on three main criteria:

• Excellence/Technical Quality (sub-criteria: challenges addressed, scientific evidence, efficacy, ongoing development, innovation).
• Impact (sub-criteria: benefits for the pig sector, economic impact, knowledge exchange).
• Exploitation/Probability of Success (sub-criteria: feasibility, transferability, scalability, exploitation speed).

Scoring was allocated on a scale of 0–5 (where 0 = no data provided, 5 = practice addressed the criteria excellently).

Process of selection and discussion

Following individual scoring by TG experts, a meeting was organized to discuss the scores and finalize the selection of the top five best practices. To facilitate discussion, the mean total scores and rankings were compiled and presented.

The discussion focused on the 11 highest-scoring practices (scores from 3.3 upwards, with the highest being 3.8). Experts compared similarities, differences, advantages, and disadvantages of these practices.

Based on the discussion and scoring, experts voted for their top five selections. This selection consisted of two practices which were unanimously selected. While the remaining three were chosen based on majority votes with experts who did not initially select them given the opportunity to voice any objections. The final five practices aim to offer diverse methods for optimizing space and flooring. They were selected and ranked in no particular order (i.e., none is inherently superior to another).

The discussion concluded that the ideal approach would be to extract and combine key elements from these practices to improve the overall pig welfare. Additionally, it is necessary that the implementation strategy to improve space allowance and flooring should be with gradual adjustments (rather than sudden changes), as success depends on country-specific contexts and farm conditions.