Institut de Recerca i tecnologia Agroalimentàries

Behaviour & Welfare

Animal Health

Body Composition

Breeding & Genetics

Carcass & Meat Quality

Environment Impact

Field Experiments

Housing & System Trials

Performance Trials

The swine experimental farm is composed of 4 barns adapted to pig research. The facilities allow for individualized animal control, with automatic feeders, climate, and animal behaviour monitoring. BUILDING NBS2 Biosecurity facility consisting of 2 buildings with independent entrance having 4 rooms each. It features a strict control on the movement of people, animals, and materials both in and out of the building, as well as specialized equipment and protocols for cleaning and sterilization. The facility is equipped with: - Negative pressure ventilation system to avoid cross contamination between rooms. - Room with nebulization system that allows disinfection of the material that comes out this building. - Necropsy room with cold store. BUILDING 2 It is composed of 6 rooms with 16 pens each. One is adapted to house weaned piglets (10 piglets/pen), and five for fattening pigs (2 pigs/pen). BUILDING 3 It has 2 departments with 3 independent rooms each (6 rooms in total). Each room has 4 pens equipped with: - Electronic feeding stations (24) to control the individual feed intake of group housed pigs. - A flowmeter to control water consumption at pen level. - A camera installed overhead to carry out behavioural studies. BUILDING 4 It is composed of only one room with 12 pens of 13 m2 to house between 10 to 14 GF pigs, and equipped with individual electronic feeding stations. The Food Industry research facility is also located in Monells, and it is specialized in food safety, quality, conservation, and transformation into the final product. This facility is composed by: - A mobile Computer Tomography (CT) unit, which is a trailer truck with a Philips Brillance 16 slice, helical, with 70cm of gantry and a 50cm field of view, to easily be delivered to farms, abattoirs and industry needs. - An experimental slaughterhouse for carcass quality examination (fat and muscle thickness, lean content, size, weight, cutting and dissection) which is complemented by the CT for a non-destructive procedure. - Refrigeration and freezing chambers, physical-chemical analysis laboratory (equipment for proximal analysis, pHmeter, colorimeter, thermostatic baths, stoves, shakers, scales, automatic titrators, spectrophotometers...), pilot plant, tasting room. - Meat quality equipment, penetration temperature probe, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) equipment, gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy equipment (CG-MS), Near Infrared Transmittance (FoodScan) equipment, SPME-GC/MS volatiles analysis equipment (solid phase microextraction and gas chromatography coupled mass spectrometry). A portable near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) device (Scio sensor, Consumer physics) (740-1070 nm); a high resolution NIR spetrometer (Bruker Optics Matrix-F dúplex, Bruker Optik GmbH) (833-2500 nm); a home-made NIR device (Hamamatsu sensor, Hamamatsu Photonics) (600-1100 nm); a Hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy (HYS) camera (Resonon Pika-L VIS/NIR, Resonon inc.) (400 to 1100 nm); a photografic system (Canon EOS 50D camera); a Computed Tomography (CT) device (Philips Brilliance 16 scaner, Koninklijke Philips N.V.) - Lastly, IRTA has 2 portable Fat-O-Meat'er II units that allow carcass grading to be carried out online at commercial slaughterhouses.