Modelling ambient conditions in the fattening room and corresponding performance of pigs with Thermipig model.

A mechanistic, dynamic and determinist model, called ThermiPig, has been developed by combining a growth model and a bioclimatic model. It allows for the prediction of the within-room thermal balance at the room level and its consequences on the daily and individual performance of group-housed pigs. As this research is part of the Pigsys ERA-Net project, co-funded under EU Horizon 2020 RI program (SuSan, www.erasusan.eu, Grant Agreement n°696231) by the French ANR (grant n°ANR-16-SUSN-0003-02), a survey was performed in different European countries by the partners of the project in order to describe different types of fattening rooms, feeding strategies and climatic conditions. Afterwards, the objective of the study was to use the results of the survey and to combine different characteristics of the fattening room (insulation, cooling and/or installed heater capacity when available, regulation rules of the climate control box) to simulate the corresponding impacts on (i) the thermal balance at room scale, (ii) growth performance, (iii) direct and indirect energy use, and (iv) nitrogen output in pigs. Simulations were performed over the whole fattening duration with each combination using 30 virtual batches of pigs, generated from an average animal growth profile. Based on outputs of the model, it is possible to evaluate the influence of insulation of walls or heater capacity under different climates or to optimize regulation rules of the climate box control of the ventilation system in terms of feed efficiency, margin on feed cost and nitrogen output.