Arbeitszeitbedarf von aktuellen Gruppenhaltungsverfahren des Wartebereichs in konventioneller Zuchtsauenhaltung in Österreich

In keeping of breeding sows, it is important to use the working time as efficiently as possible to ensure economics within legal production conditions. This can be supported by providing working time requirement data. Therefore, the aim of this study was to generate working time requirement of current group keeping systems in the waiting area of breeding sows. For this purpose, in the keeping systems for small groups with feeding bay and large groups with retrieval station, data was collected using mobile video technology and semi-standardized questionnaires at four farms with current technology. With the gained data, operating models were created under optimized conditions in order to display the working time requirement of work processes for different stock sizes. Both keeping systems differed significantly from each other in the total working time requirement over different stock sizes. The total working time requirement in the waiting area with a typical herd size of 140 breeding sows of Austrian growing farms was 3.58 MPh/sow/year for the small group and 2.68 MPh/sow/year for the large group. The comparison of the available results with data from previous studies indicated the trend of decrease in working hours per sow and year. This was due to technical progress which enabled larger herd sizes.