• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.20 no.8
• /
• pp.200-206
• /
• 2019

Korea is introducing new animal welfare rearing standards for swine farmers in order to improve the breeding environment of livestock on Korean farms, Korea is establishing a policy to apply to all new farms in 2019 and to all existing farms in 2025. These guidelines are limiting stall breeding of sows after 4 weeks of pregnancy, the light intensity should be above 40lux, the ammonia level should be below 25ppm and the breeding density area should be increased from $1.4m^2$ to $2.25m^2$. In Europe, where animal welfare has been studied and applied for nearly 100 years, the facility specifications and management manuals are available and provided to farmers to introduce proper animal welfare for pigs and to enhance the convenience and utility of farmers who are converting to raising pigs. The EU has established independent standards for each country, and the EU has set the standards for floor facilities to improve animal welfare on pig farms and as applied by farmers. Yet in Korea, there are no methods and techniques for breeding methods that do not use an ordinary stall, except on a few leading farms. There has been no research on the welfare of sows so that farmer could improve sows' living conditions. Thus, farmers can minimize the difficulty of implementing the changing government policies, and they must develop farm turnover policies and specification management manuals to cope with the introduced regulations on sow group housing. We suggest that conducting research and evaluating the level of sows' welfare are important for farmers.