Day 088 - 13 Feb 95 - Page 52
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2 MS. STEEL: Right, ok, so all the pigs on the indoor system
3 would remain indoors all the time, the sows?
4 A. Are you talking about grandparents' stock or the
5 multiplying stock?
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7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I think Ms. Steel is bit puzzled, as I am, by
8 why we have to go back to the grandparents. Why can we not
9 just go back to the parents? Why miss out the parents? It
10 is probably obvious to you but it is not to me.
11 A. Well, if we go to the parents stock of our finishing
12 pigs, they will come from a straw based system, or an
13 outdoor system and they are multiplying. They are coming
14 from what we call the "multiplying herds".
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16 Q. So you merely take "grandparent" because that is as far as
17 back as you go; is that right?
18 A. I will try and explain it to you, sir. In the breeding
19 programme we have to try and look ahead to see what is
20 required for the future. We can then get our grandparents'
21 stock breeding to the standards that we want and then
22 multiplying is actually out on farms to produce the gilts
23 and the boars that we want on our own breeding farms.
24 Therefore, we have, as I said earlier, two different
25 streams for outdoor and indoor production and all the way
26 up the stream of the outdoor production it would be outdoor
27 reared basically, sir. The indoor not; they would be
28 indoor, some of them would for much of the day.
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30 It is very much, when you come to multiplying, to
31 individual farmers. They are farming buildings that they
32 have etc. because they are scattered all over the country.
33 The idea of that is so that you can have one stream to try
34 and keep your disease factor down so it is more healthy for
35 all the pigs. I hope that explains it.
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37 Q. It may not matter from your point of view because you are
38 asking which of them live in and which of them live out.
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40 MS. STEEL: I am still not sure, to be honest. I understand the
41 bit about the outdoor pigs. The indoor pigs, you get for
42 breeding indoors. Those pigs would have been born indoors
43 and reared indoors before you got them, for the 9 months
44 before you got, or the 8 to 10 months before you got them?
45 A. Yes, they have born inside on an earlier straw system,
46 yes.
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48 Q. I think you said that the boars that were with the outdoor
49 breeding pigs were not the ones that were the ones that
50 mated them. Was that right or not?
51 A. There are the boars that are outside with the outdoor
52 sows and gilts, they have the pleasure of mating both the
53 those.
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55 Q. They do?
56 A. Yes.
57
58 Q. On the indoor breeding system, are the sows running loose
59 while the mating is going on?
60 A. Yes, they are.
