Agroscope

Animal Health

Body Composition

Carcass & Meat Quality

Performance Trials

Physiological Studies

Agroscope’s swine research facility houses a herd of 90 sows in a 3-week farrowing system. The offsprings are weaned at about 26 days of age. When reaching 20-25 kg, piglets are either kept for growing-finishing experiments, kept for gilt raising or sold. Research is mainly focused on animal nutrition, thus group pens for all animal categories are equipped with automatic dry feeders collecting feed intake data on an individual basis. There are 7 pens for gestating sows, 3 farrowing rooms with 14 pens each, 6 pens for weaners, 8 pens for grower-finishers (2 feeding stations per pen). In addition, one pen equipped with 4 feeding stations for 48 growing-finishing pigs is on a deep-straw system with exterior climate. Individual pens and metabolic cages are available for digestibility experiments with or without the use of indigestible markers. All necessary infrastructure for the swine research facility is onsite: The feed mill, the abattoir and the laboratory for chemical and physiological analysis and for meat quality. In addition, all equipment necessary to prepare samples for chemical body composition determination is onsite, along with two dual energy X-ray absorptiometers (DXA) for instant live and carcass body composition measures.