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With little effort conventional pig farmers can evaluate the costs of using three methods of surgical piglet castration:
- inhalation anesthesia [isoflurane]
- injection anesthesia [ketamine/azaperone]
- local anesthesia [procaine]
The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) funded the project PraxiKaPIK/A - "Practical tests of surgical castration of piglets under anesthesia with procaine, isoflurane and ketamine/azaperone as well as postoperative pain elimination" within the framework of the pilot project Animal Welfare. This project was carried out by the Chamber of Agriculture of North Rhine-Westphalia in cooperation with the Institute of Animal Sciences of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn and the Thünen-Institute of Business Administration in order to evaluate the different alternatives with regard to their impact on labor costs and economics for conventional farms.
To evaluate the economics of the individual procedures, a tool has been developed for German piglet producers as a decision-making aid. The widely used Microsoft Excel is used as software, simplifying the calculation with the help of Visual Basic programming.
Data is entered including production and business numbers as well as the location of the farm. After entering individual farm data, the farmer is given a calculation for the additional costs for the castration procedures carried out in the experiment and the incurred additional working time is calculated. The results are presented on a printable, one-page report. The calculations can be repeated as desired.
Findings are based on the experimental results from this project. The farm entered is classified according to farm size and group size, evaluated against the values in the experimental database and supplemented by the individual farm assumptions regarding pay rate and the current price for pigs. The results should give the user an overview and an estimate of how the alternatives to anesthesia-free piglet castration could affect his farm. A complete profit and loss statement cannot be drawn up. Likewise no operation-specific conditions, which could affect the course of an anesthesia administration, are considered.
November 2019/ Thünen Institute/ Germany.
https://www.thuenen.de
