Steffen Werne

Description of organic pig production in Europe

With the aim to identify health and welfare strategies in organic pig production, a description of the different organic production systems was realized in eight European countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and UK). This description was based on the following features: numbers of organic farms and organic pigs, market shares, housing and management characteristics, feeding characteristics, main health problems and relevant differences to the EU regulation existing at the time of the project. The results were primarily based on statistics, country-specific regulations as well as on expert and stakeholder interviews. Organic farming and organic pig production are rapidly developing in European countries. The European country with the highest number of organic pigs is Germany. Organic pig production represents a minor part of the whole pig production in all surveyed countries. All features that were analysed varied greatly between countries with the most striking one being the housing of pigs that can be completely outdoors on pasture for most UK farms and always indoors with an access to an outdoor run, during part of their life, for most farms of German speaking countries.

The genetic basis for the selection of dairy goats with enhanced resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes

Gastrointestinal nematodes (GIN) severely affect small ruminant production worldwide. Increasing problems of anthelmintic resistance have given strong impetus to the search for alternative strategies to control GIN. Selection of animals with an enhanced resistance to GIN has been shown to be successful in sheep. In goats, the corresponding information is comparatively poor. Therefore, the present study was designed to provide reliable data on heritabilities of and genetic correlations between phenotypic traits linked to GIN and milk yield in two major dairy goat breeds (Alpine and Saanen). In all, 20 herds totalling 1303 goats were enrolled in the study. All herds had (i) a history of gastrointestinal nematode infection, (ii) uniform GIN exposure on pasture and (iii) regular milk recordings. For all goats, individual recordings of faecal egg counts (FEC), FAMACHA© eye score, packed cell volume (PCV) and milk yield were performed twice a year with an anthelmintic treatment in between. The collected phenotypic data were multivariately modelled using animal as a random effect with its covariance structure inferred from the pedigree, enabling estimation of the heritabilities of the respective traits and the genetic correlation between them. The heritabilities of FEC, FAMACHA© and PCV were 0.07, 0.22 and 0.22, respectively. The genetic correlation between FEC and FAMACHA© was close to zero and −0.41 between FEC and PCV. The phenotypic correlation between FEC and milk yield was close to zero, whereas the genetic correlation was 0.49. Our data suggest low heritability of FEC in Saanen and Alpine goats and an unfavourable genetic correlation of FEC with milk yield.