Group housing for pregnant sows offers significant welfare improvements over individual stalls but requires careful management.
Group housing for sows represents a genuine welfare improvement over gestation crates: social interaction, movement, and expression of natural behaviours are possible. The management challenges — aggression at mixing, feeding competition, injury detection — are real but manageable with appropriate stockperson training and system design. ESF systems have largely solved the feeding competition problem; stable group composition, adequate space, and appropriate mixing management address aggression. The welfare argument for group housing is unambiguous; the management argument for well-designed, well-managed group systems is equally compelling.