News
New research project aims to reduce odour, ammonia and GHG emission from pig production
A new four-year public-private partnership (PPP) project has been launched to tackle the emission of noxious gases and the resulting odour nuisance coming from pig production. The project brings together knowledge institutions, industry partners and government bodies to develop integrated solutions that benefit animals, farmers, the environment and society.
Public acceptance
Pig production makes an important contribution to human food supply. However, the release of odour and emission of harmful gasses like ammonia and greenhouse gasses (GHG), have a negative impact for nearby residents and on climate and biodiversity, animal and human health, and public acceptance of pig production. Current emission reduction methods mostly rely on housing systems and air scrubbers, but these have shown to be inadequate to reduce odour and emission of GHG effectively. Moreover, these so called end-of-pipe solutions do not improve the farm indoor air quality and therefore do not alleviate the negative impact of these gases on the health of the pigs and farm workers. Therefore, a group of public and private parties has initiated a joint research project aiming to develop nutritional strategies and integrate these with innovative manure management and low-emission pen designs to improve the indoor air quality. Improving the indoor air quality will aid the health conditions for pigs and farm workers, and contribute decreasing the environmental impact of pig production.
State-of-the-art technology
The efficiency of the measures will be evaluated by state-of-the-art sensor technology that will monitor the animal well-being and the indoor and outdoor gas emissions. The project will develop laboratory and sensor techniques to quantitatively monitor odorous emissions, and nutritional concepts for low-emission diets in small scale studies, of which the most promising concepts will be validated under practical housing conditions, assessing the air quality and well-being of the pigs using novel state-of-the-art sensor technology.
By the end of the project, the partners aim to deliver a comprehensive strategy for more sustainable pig farming, including low impact feed resources, to be integrated with low-emission pen lay-outs, state of the art manure management and end-of-pipe technologies.
Partners
This four-year project is co-ordinated by Wageningen University & Research. Partners involved are Province Noord-Brabant, Producenten Organisatie Varkenshouderij (POV), Agrifirm, Voergroep Zuid, DSM-Firmenich, CJ Europe, an ADM group entity and Environmental Monitoring Systems (EMS). The project is co-funded by the Dutch Government within the Topsector Agri & Food (project LWV23.145).