Animal welfare programs support lower production intensity and environmental enrichment to create additional value for animals and consumers, by facilitating farms to resolve the conflict between animal welfare and efficient farming. Yet, the success of such enrichments in improving animal welfare and thus the productive performance depends on farmers’ production process management. Complexity of animal welfare, and its unclear role for the hog finishing process’ performance, challenges the evaluation of animal welfare programs. Using unique farm-level data comprising cost accounting and production economic data, participation status in the German program “Initiative Tierwohl” and animal health scores collected at the abattoir, we investigate the relationship between farm performance, animal health and program participation. This study relies on relative farm performance measures of technical and cost efficiency, obtained by nonparametric data envelopment analysis. Statistical correlation analysis and distribution difference testing was supported by locally estimated scatterplot smoothing. The findings indicate the possibility for high farm performance with low prevalence rates of internal organ alterations, also for non-participants. Program participants, however, achieved better relative farm performance and higher levels of respiratory health scores. Based on the indications from abattoir data, no statistically significant relationship between animal health and farm performance, and no moderating role of the program could be found for the sampled farms. We conclude that low threshold programs, such as the “Initiative Tierwohl”, might provide an incentive for adjusting the environment and can thus contribute to increasing sustainability in pork production.

动物福利计划通过促进农场解决动物福利与有效耕种之间的冲突，支持降低生产强度和丰富环境，从而为动物和消费者创造附加价值。然而，这种浓缩在改善动物福利以及从而提高生产性能方面的成功取决于农民的生产过程管理。动物福利的复杂性及其对生猪屠宰过程性能的不清楚作用，对动物福利计划的评估提出了挑战。利用包括成本会计和生产经济数据，德国计划“ Tierwohl”的参与状态以及屠宰场收集的动物健康评分在内的独特农场水平数据，我们研究了农场绩效，动物健康与计划参与之间的关系。本研究依靠通过非参数数据包络分析获得的有关技术和成本效率的相对农场绩效指标。统计相关性分析和分布差异测试得到本地估计的散点图平滑的支持。研究结果表明，对于非参与者，也可能具有较高的农场绩效和较低的内脏器官发生率。但是，计划参与者的相对农场表现更好，呼吸健康得分更高。根据屠宰场数据显示的结果，在动物健康与农场经营之间没有统计学上的显着关系，并且该计划的农场在抽样农场中没有任何调节作用。我们得出的结论是，低门槛计划，例如“ Initiative Tierwohl”，