Qualitative assessment of current situation and future aims by organic pig farmers

The CORE Organic II project ProPIG aimed to assess animal health and welfare as well asenvironmental impact on organic pig farms across three husbandry systems in Europe (indoor,outdoor and partly outdoor) and to develop farm specific improvement strategies. 74 farmsacross the 8 project countries were visited three times within one year. In addition to assessinganimal health and welfare indicators and environmental impact, semi-qualitative interviews wereconducted on 63 farms during farm visits 1 and 3 to evaluate the farmer’s satisfaction with thestatus quo, perception of future aims and ideas for improvement. Some questions were asked asopen questions, while others used a five-point answer scale.A descriptive classification of the responses to the open question regarding the goals for theimmediate future revealed that most farmers were aiming to improve either health (19 responses),performance (13) or welfare (9) (two answers per farm were possible). Improving welfare wasexclusively a topic for indoor or partly indoor farmers, whereas improving performance wasproportionally more often mentioned by outdoor farmers. Similar results were found when askedto rate the satisfaction with pig health and welfare at visit 1: 9% (3) and 38% (13) of indoorfarmers were very satisfied with the health and welfare situation, respectively (point 5 on thescale), whereas on outdoor farms 50% (6) were very satisfied and 50% (6) satisfied. Outdoorfarmers were less satisfied with the production level (25% (3) very satisfied, 9% (1) satisfied and66% (8) neutral). 63% (40) and 53% (33) of all farmers across the three systems stated that animprovement in terms of health or welfare, respectively, is needed and also possible to implement.Our results show that organic pig farmers, in general and especially when pigs are kept indoors,are aware of problems relating to animal health and welfare and are willing to improve