Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Pigs
Alternative breeding approaches are much less common in pigs and poultry than in dairy cows.
There is a large variation in the (relatively small) organic pig market, ranging from normal lean
meat for supermarket chains up to relatively fat breeds for sausage production. Therefore, it is
difficult to define appropriate breeding goals for all possible organic marketing purposes. In
countries like Germany and Austria, only the amount of lean meat is paid for at conventional
slaughterhouses. In other countries like Denmark or Switzerland, intramuscular fat percentage
(IMF) is also considered. IMF is important for meat quality as it is highly correlated to sensory
properties like taste, tenderness and juiciness. Breeding for highly muscular animals has led to
a decrease of IMF and an increase of PSE meat in pigs (e.g. Hörning 1997). Another parameter
is fat quality, which is important, for example, for sausage production. However, many organic
consumers also ask for lean meat. Therefore, a conf lict of goals exists and it will be necessary to
convince those consumers of the advantages of meat with a higher IMF.
Some breeding companies are looking for traits like fertility or lifetime performance in
mother breeds. Alternatively, conformation parameters can be considered, such as limb
posture as an indicator for lameness susceptibility. Furthermore, behavioural traits like moth-
ering ability or suitability for group housing are considered by some companies. For example,
Grandinson
et
al
. (2003) found a relationship between sows' avoidance of the farmer and piglet
mortality. This is especially important in the loose housing of farrowing sows favoured in
organic agriculture. Similar to cow breeding, suitable measuring methods are missing for
some parameters, such as roughage conversion. There are examples of breeds suited especially
for specific housing conditions, like some breeds developed for outdoor pig production in the
UK.
Poultry
Development of hybrid breeding has led to strictly separate strains of poultry for meat or egg
production. Selection for very high performances has promoted many health problems, such
as sudden death syndrome, leg problems or ascites in broilers. At least for meat poultry, the EU
regulation for organic agriculture takes this into account, because minimum slaughter ages
are prescribed, which are much longer than for conventional production.
Male layer chickens are normally killed directly after hatching because fattening them is not
economical. This is a serious ethical problem. Furthermore, conventional laying hens are
normally used only for one laying period (about one year). Again, this could be considered as
ethically questionable. It is very difficult to feed high-yielding poultry strains according to their
nutritional requirements with the feedstuffs allowed for organic agriculture. Supplying poultry
with essential amino acids is particularly difficult with the available protein feedstuffs.
Performances should be reduced for organic farming because of the abovementioned
reasons. Vitality and adaptability will be especially important for birds in alternative housing
systems because modern layers have been selected under cage conditions. Feather pecking and
cannibalism can be a problem for many hybrid strains under alternative housing conditions.
However, there is some heritability and therefore selection against these behavioural distur-
bances might be useful (Sorensen 2001).
Most organic poultry farmers use normal hybrid strains at least for laying hens. For meat
poultry like turkeys or broilers some slower growing strains are available, bred for example, for
the free-range label production in France. However, these birds are also hybrids, which mean
that the farmers cannot reproduce their own animals.
Tests in Germany and in Denmark have shown that the egg production of purebred layers
is much lower than those of modern hybrid strains (Hörning 2000, Sorensen 2001). During the
