Irish pig businesses operate in a technically demanding environment where biological performance, feed inputs, animal health, welfare, environmental controls, labour, energy, processor requirements and export continuity interact. Teagasc’s 2025 National Pig Herd Performance Report covers 85 participating herds and more than 74,500 sows, underlining both the scale of formal performance recording in the sector and the value of evidence-led improvement.
The strongest innovation programmes do not begin with a product purchase or a grant application. They begin with a defined material problem: for example, unstable post-weaning performance, unacceptable ammonia concentration, unreliable disease alerts, tail-biting risk, or poor data continuity from feed to carcass. The project must then identify a scientific or technological uncertainty, propose a method to resolve it, and retain evidence of the work, results, deviations and costs.
The commercial lens matters. Feed conversion remains important, but decisions should also consider margin per pig place, saleable output, carcass result, nutrient efficiency, labour requirement, energy use and implementation risk. A solution that performs in one batch but cannot transfer across ingredients, rooms, health states or farm teams is not yet a dependable commercial capability.
This approach is particularly relevant following the EU withdrawal of pharmacological veterinary zinc oxide (ZnO) for oral use in pigs. High-dose ZnO had been used to help manage post-weaning diarrhoea (PWD), but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded that its benefits did not outweigh environmental risks, and the European Commission’s 2017 decision permitted a transition period of up to five years. The issue is not the removal of nutritional zinc from a normal diet; it is the loss of a medicinal, high-dose post-weaning management tool. This creates a practical need to strengthen herd-specific prevention, nutrition, diagnostics, hygiene and environmental control rather than assume there is one universal substitute.
| Priority | Business question | Innovation opportunity |
| Feed and margin | Can performance be stabilised while reducing nutrient waste and input risk? | Batch-aware feeding, digestibility modelling, alternative ingredient validation, enzyme/nutrient-delivery research and decision support |
| Piglet gut health | Can PWD risk be reduced without pharmacological ZnO and without avoidable antimicrobial use? | Integrated nutrition, biosecurity, diagnostics, environmental control and early-warning systems. |
| Health and biosecurity | Can disease risk be identified and contained earlier? | Verified cleaning, sensor/data integration, pathogen-risk models and targeted prevention. |
| Welfare and housing | Can welfare outcomes improve without reducing throughput or resilience? | Integrated pen, enrichment, feeder, climate and behavioural monitoring design. |
| Manure and air | Can environmental performance improve without unacceptable energy, corrosion or cost effects? | Treatment, separation, acidification, storage, measurement and nutrient-recovery trials. |
| Labour and continuity | Can automation reduce failure risk and intervention time? | Reliable monitoring, safe-failure controls, predictive maintenance, automated exception workflows and interoperable data.. |
1. Why innovation matters now
The Irish pig sector is technically advanced and exposed to changing feed, energy, health, welfare, environmental and market conditions. Teagasc’s Outlook 2026 treats pigs as a distinct agricultural sector, while its dedicated 2025 herd-performance report provides a current Irish baseline for productivity and feed-conversion metrics. For business planning, these pressures should be treated as connected rather than isolated.
Environmental and operational expectations also reinforce the need for integrated solutions. Ireland’s current air-emissions reporting continues to identify ammonia among the pollutants managed under national and EU commitments. At EU level, the reference material for intensive rearing of poultry or pigs covers management, feeding, animal rearing, manure collection and storage, treatment, land spreading, and wastewater treatment. This means a credible pig innovation programme should evaluate performance, environment, safety, cost and operability together.
| Pressure | What a robust response looks like | Evidence to retain |
| Feed-price and ingredient variability | A diet and feeding system that tolerates realistic ingredient variation, not only a single successful ration. | Feed batches, specifications, intake, growth, FCR, carcass results, nutrient excretion estimates and margin. |
| Health and biosecurity | Prevention and rapid response designed around commercial animal flows and farm-specific hazards. | Biosecurity audits, cleaning verification, health records, diagnostic results, mortality, treatments and recovery times. |
| Welfare and tail integrity | A system-level intervention rather than a single enrichment or stocking-density change. | Behaviour, lesions, removals, feeder access, climate, enrichment use, growth and staff intervention records. |
| Slurry, air and water | A whole-chain solution that avoids transferring a problem from air to slurry, energy use or corrosion. | Ammonia/GHG readings, nutrient analysis, energy use, reliability, safety incidents, maintenance and costs. |
| Labour and resilience | Automation that reduces routine burden and fails safely. | Minutes per pig, alarm burden, uptime, failures, response times, training needs and hygiene outcomes. |
1.1 Welfare, biosecurity and antimicrobial stewardship
DAFM’s current biosecurity collection includes the National Farmed Animal Biosecurity Strategy 2025–2030, relevant African swine fever material, and indoor-pig biosecurity guidance. Ireland’s current AMR collection identifies the Third One Health National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance 2026–2030 (iNAP3) as the up-to-date national plan and includes a pig-farm code of good practice on responsible antimicrobial use.
These sources support an innovation agenda centred on prevention, earlier detection, appropriate diagnosis, targeted intervention and measurable outcomes—not delayed treatment or a simplistic assumption that lower antimicrobial use is always better irrespective of animal welfare.
DAFM’s pig-welfare material also makes clear that pig welfare is tied to legal standards and management practice, including access to water and enrichment, flooring, environmental conditions, stocking/mixing management and avoidance of routine tail docking. The R&D question is therefore not whether compliance itself qualifies; routine compliance normally does not. It is whether a company is conducting systematic work to resolve a genuine biological or engineering uncertainty beyond established practice.
1.2 Road Map 2030: a commercial planning lens
Teagasc’s Pig Road Map 2030, published in April 2026, presents an overview of Ireland’s pig sector to 2030, including current performance, market outlook, sustainability priorities and future targets. Teagasc notes the sector’s export orientation, skilled-entrant challenge and focus on carbon efficiency, ammonia and wider emissions. The framework below is an InnoFund planning lens informed by that roadmap. It is not a forecast, guarantee or substitute for a farm-specific strategy.
| Period | Strategic question | Practical innovation and investment focus |
| 2026 | Where are current margin, health and resilience losses? | Establish feed, mortality, growth, medication, energy and labour baselines; close material biosecurity and system-reliability gaps before major capital decisions. |
| 2027 | Which data could improve a recurring farm or supply-chain decision? | Link feed batches, water, climate, animal events, treatments, slurry and carcass feedback; test whether earlier intervention is reliable, explainable and valuable. |
| 2028–2029 | Which welfare, housing and environmental investments need proof before scale-up? | Pilot integrated pen, climate, energy, manure and labour interventions at meaningful commercial scale; retain implementation and outcome evidence. |
| 2030 onward | What outcomes must be demonstrable to sustain competitiveness and market access? | Build verifiable performance, resource-efficiency, welfare, assurance and supply-chain-data capability into investment and innovation plans. |
2. The six farmwide innovation challenges
The transition away from pharmacological zinc oxide is important, but it sits within a broader set of interdependent challenges. Irish pig businesses must deliver predictable biological performance while improving animal health and welfare, using nutrients and energy efficiently, reducing environmental impact, and coping with complex operational data and labour demands. Teagasc’s pig-research programme spans nutrition, welfare, health, management, environment and technology, demonstrating that these are established, cross-cutting sector priorities rather than isolated issues.
These challenges are systemic. A lower-protein, ZnO-free starter diet may reduce a PWD risk in one batch yet affect growth, FCR or cost in another. A ventilation intervention may improve thermal conditions but increase energy use or alter gas concentrations. A tail-biting intervention may improve animal outcomes but add a hygiene or staff-workflow burden. Innovation should therefore be judged through performance, welfare, health, environmental, labour and value outcomes together. The OneWelPig programme reflects this whole-system approach by considering animals, people, environment, practical constraints and farm economics.
| Farmwide challenge | Why it matters across commercial units | Potential technical uncertainty | Routine activity that is not R&D by itself |
| Feed efficiency, nutrient use and ingredient resilience | FCR, protein-use efficiency, ingredient variability and nutrient excretion affect farm economics and environmental performance. Teagasc tracks FCE and intake in its current national herd-performance reporting. | Can a diet-design, model or feeding architecture maintain performance under meaningful ingredient, health and climate variation where available approaches are insufficient? | Using a standard feed, substituting a familiar ingredient, ordinary ration reformulation or routine FCR benchmarking. |
| Endemic health, biosecurity and responsible antimicrobial use | Disease prevention, transmission control, health-data visibility, food safety and appropriate treatment are core to commercial performance. AHI’s Pig HealthCheck includes biosecurity, tail-biting and salmonella resources, a health database and AMU information. | Can a validated early-warning, cleaning-verification, pathogen-risk or cross-site decision system reduce risk better than existing practice? | Applying an available biosecurity code, routine testing, vaccination, treatment protocols or ordinary veterinary support. |
| Tail integrity, welfare and higher-welfare expectations | Welfare requirements affect all systems and tail biting is shaped by interacting environmental, behavioural, health, climate, nutritional and management factors. DAFM notes that routine tail docking is prohibited. | Can a transferable housing, climate, enrichment, feeder-access and behavioural-warning system prevent tail biting across commercial variability without unacceptable trade-offs? | Buying standard enrichment, meeting a known welfare requirement or implementing an established practice. |
| Indoor climate, air quality, heat resilience and energy | Ventilation affects welfare, health, growth, labour and energy across indoor farms, particularly where controls must balance temperature, humidity, dust, gases and age-specific demand. | Can an adaptive system optimise comfort, air quality, energy consumption and safe-failure response at room or pen level in uncertain real-world conditions? | Replacing fans, installing standard controls, ordinary maintenance or changing electricity supplier. |
The R&D boundary. A challenge may affect almost every pig farm without creating qualifying R&D at every farm. Routine compliance, ordinary farm management, a conventional performance trial, available veterinary/nutrition advice and equipment purchase do not become R&D merely because the challenge is important. A potential R&D question arises only where a company undertakes systematic investigative or experimental work to resolve a genuine scientific or technological uncertainty.
In the next post, we will cover ‘Zinc oxide withdrawal and post-weaning diarrhoea‘ and ‘When Ireland’s R&D Corporation Tax Credit may apply‘.