Work economics in Upper Austrian piglet production
2004
Blumauer, E.(Bundesanstalt fuer Landtechnik (BLT), Wieselburg (Austria))
In co-operation with the Upper Austrian Chamber of Agriculture and the Association of Agricul-tural Product Processors, a work-economics survey was carried out on 123 piglet-production farms in 2003. The aim of the survey was to develop future-oriented strategies for improving labour efficiency in piglet production by comparing different farms co-operating within working groups. Farms participating in the survey kept an average of 74 breeding sows, a number clearly above the Austrian average. Farmers themselves noted down working time during the production cy-cle, focussing on regularly occurring tasks. Simultaneously, farm-specific working conditions were recorded by means of a farm questionnaire. Fifty-nine per cent of the farms hand-fed their piglets during rearing, the phase in which approx. half of the total feed is consumed. In most cases, mechanization of feeding would re-quire little financial investment, and would reduce both the workload and feeding time in piglet rearing by approx. 50%. Further reductions in working time could be achieved by omitting the basic ration for breeding sows and/or switching to automatic sow feeding over the whole of pig production. In the area of dung removal, the potential for saving working time is considerably higher, with an average farm being able to save 4 MPh per breeding sow and year by changing over from solid to liquid manure. In general, the average working time recorded for regular tasks very closely matched standard KTBL values.
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