An increasing human population requires that global agricultural outputs increase by at least 50% by 2050, including arable, horticultural and animal products. Not only will there be more people to feed, but for some animal products (pork and poultry), there are trends of increased consumption.Sustainable livestock production requires links between farm characteristics, animal performance and animal health to be recognised and understood. In the pig industry, respiratory disease is prevalent, and has negative health, welfare and economic consequences. This study used national-level carcass inspection data from the Food Standards Agency to identify associations between pig respiratory disease, farm characteristics (housing type and number of source farms), and pig performance (mortality, average daily weight gain, back fat and carcass weight) from 49 all in/all out grow-to-finish farms. It took a confirmatory approach by pre-registering the hypotheses and used Bayesian multi-level modelling to quantify the uncertainty in our estimates. The study findings showed that acquiring growing pigs from multiple sources was associated with higher respiratory condition prevalence. Higher prevalence of respiratory conditions was linked with higher mortality, and lower average daily weight gain, back fat and pig carcass weight. The results support previous literature using a range of data sources. In conclusion, find that meat inspection data are more valuable at a finer resolution than has been previously indicated and could be a useful tool in monitoring batch-level pig health in the future.

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