Pros And Cons Of The Gestation Sow Housing System

The United States of America is the world’s second largest producer of pork. Iowa alone has a hog to people ratio of 6:1. When an industry is as large as the swine industry, there are bound to be issues that will affect everyone in all the different areas. The issue of gestation housing is a very hot topic that the swine industry is currently facing. There are many aspects to take into consideration when you are tackling this question: what are the gestation housing options and what are the pros and cons for them, what groups of people have say on this issue and why they have the amount of influence that they have, why is this question being asked in the first place, and what affect does this decision have on the present and the future of the

The gestation period is then referred to as the time from which conception takes place to the act of birth or farrowing. In sows, the gestation period is three months, three weeks and three days, or 114 days. According to the article, Gestation Sow Housing System: Which is Best?, there are seven keys to gestation housing: environment, protection of the sows, body condition, heath of the sows, worker safety, management and economics of priorities (Whitney 1). Four of these seven keys relate directly onto the sows themselves. The swine industry is focused on the sows because they are what make up this industry. They are the root to the entirety of many issues and will always be because when dealing with the animal industries there are always going to be people who want to change or alter how something is happening or occurring. The debate on gestation housing is generally between two different housing systems: stall housing or open pen/group housing, and which the better one

At the beginning of the chain you have the farmers. They are the ones that raise the hogs for sale and consumption. When you look at the article The U.S. Gestation Stall Debate, you can see that by using stalls, farmer are trying to be more efficient and by being more efficient they are able to keep the price down for the consumers in the end (Tonsor and Schulz 1). The next step in the chain is packers and companies. Once those hogs from the farmers get sold, they go to packers where they are processed, labeled, and shipped out to stores and suppliers. From there everything goes into the consumer’s hands. The consumers are the ones that have the most say in how everything will go. They are the ones who will or will not buy a product, they are the ones to say what they want to buy, be it organic or not, and they are the ones who have the most influence in the gestation housing debate. In the 2009 article, Consumer Voting and Demand behavior Regarding Swine Gestation Crates, researchers found that regarding this issue, consumers were not necessarily looking at stall housing as a means to protect the sows, control feed intake and keep the sows healthy, but with the lens of both food safety, quality of the pork and the size of the farm that it comes from (Tonsor, Wolf and Olynk 492). Another fault that the consumers have fallen under is that they tend