The farm is located near the Spanish city Segovia, with in the background the snow-covered mountain tops of the Sierra de Guadarrama.


Sows in the gestation rooms. The animals are calm and at ease.


air and also measure the air flow, to determine the mass of pollutants emitted per place and year as international stand- ards demand.” In one of the rooms, eight purpose-built ‘metabolic cages’ can be found – elevated individual sow stalls. The pens come with drawers underneath so that any faeces and urine can be col- lected and analysed immediately, e.g. in digestibility or phar- macokinetics studies. An extension is possible to accommo- date piglets as well. Sows don’t stay in here very long, Piñeiro adds, at the most a few days. At the moment of the visit, it didn’t have any occupants. One of the first trials having taken place in these metabolic cages was a research in co-operation with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), to identify the effects of dietary betaine and conjugated linoleic acid. A small part of


the farm’s piglets (roughly 1,000 per year) will be moved to one of the new building’s five grow-finisher rooms. This allows the CEP to observe long-term effects of certain feeding trials in sows on their progeny until about 150-160 days. One of these rooms is equipped with four Nedap’s Pig Performance Testers, devices which can individually measure feed intake, body weight and feed efficiency using ear tags, up to 16 pigs in every one of them. In the other three sections, feeding is done manually from bags, which is also measured. A surgery- necropsy room completes this farm building.


The 2004 section The initial farm complex, acquired in 2004 for around €900,000, consists of two barns. It is in use for dry and lactating sows and runs as a regular commercial farm in case


Tangible trial results at the CEP


Examples of research outcomes done at the CEP in Segovia include various published results. Together with Animine, at the CEP trials were done on organic ZnO at very low doses to control diarrhoea. With Evonik, work was done on amino acid ratios. With Zinpro, the farm did trials on adjusted microminer- als doses for grow-finishers and piglets to increase vitality and robustness, with Elanco on birthweight and survivability. In addition, practical work was carried out on gilt progeny segre- gation, improving health and decreasing antibiotics. In addi- tion, for the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Magrama), some housing and nutrition tech- niques were tested to control pollutant emissions using Best Available Techniques.


18 PIG PROGRESS VOLUME 32, No. 6,2016


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28