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This paper takes an in-depth look at how to improve production efficiency in hog\u00a0operations\u00a0by improving sow management practices and genetic management. Three different areas are looked at and shown how improvements can increase production efficiency. The first area covered is sow and guilt management. Currently about half of sows are culled while only producing about 30-40 piglets in their life time, furthermore about 20% of sows are culled while not even giving birth.\u00a0Better selection of gilts is one way to improve this, selecting\u00a0gilts based on weight has proven to be a\u00a0more\u00a0effective strategy than based on age. \u00a0Improving guilt and sow management practices can have great benefits to an operations efficiency if attention is paid to all the small details. Some targets that should be the goal\u00a0of any operation\u00a0are: greater than 86% farrowing rates, greater than 12.5 total piglets born, greater than 70%\u00a0of gilts served farrowing the 3rd litter, and 50 pigs weaned lifetime. The second topic focuses on the variability in grow-finish performance that can be linked back to birth weight. It is stated that growth rate after birth has already been pre-programmed before the pig is even born, this becomes most evident in the grow finish stage. Sorting pigs in the nursery and grow stage will not resolve variation in growth performance , it is still a characteristic of individual pigs and litters. The paper argues that recognizing and managing differences in birth weight and post natal growth between litters\u00a0has the potential\u00a0to\u00a0cut costs\u00a0in the immediate future. The third topic covered was the need to improve the genetic impact of elite sires. The overall production efficiency of the herd is dependent on the reproductive capacity of the boars used for mating, and the genetic merit\u00a0of those boars. Because the pork industry will use one boar to breed hundreds\u00a0of sows, if that boar has poor genetics it will impact thousands of pigs.\u00a0Better management of genetic factors have the ability to improve\u00a0overall production efficiency and\u00a0help producers become more competitive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This paper takes an in-depth look at how to improve production efficiency in hog\u00a0operations\u00a0by improving sow management practices and genetic management. Three different areas are looked at and shown how improvements can increase production efficiency. The first area covered is sow and guilt management. Currently about half of sows are culled while only producing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14948],"tags":[4605,5162,785,2349,26453,19075,2858,3814,583,231,19644,286,103,7846,3804,20007,105,158,18528,324,63,22808,14,126,89,33,1324,2608,20912,25789,104,96,20911,18011,24994,6053,2446,1301],"class_list":["post-13316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pork-insight-articles","category-swine-innovation-pork-insight-articles","tag-birth-weight","tag-boar","tag-boars","tag-breed","tag-c999shell-apache","tag-cache_dgxqxpqsd0jwww-prairieswine-comevaluation-of-l-glutamine-for-cryopreservation-of-boar-spermatozoa","tag-capacity","tag-competitive","tag-costs","tag-cover","tag-dd","tag-dust","tag-farrowing","tag-farrowing-rate","tag-genetic","tag-gh","tag-gilt","tag-growth","tag-improving-efficiency","tag-nursery","tag-performance","tag-pic","tag-pig","tag-piglet","tag-piglets","tag-pigs","tag-pork","tag-pork-industry","tag-some","tag-sorting-pigs","tag-sow","tag-sows","tag-t","tag-tot","tag-usa","tag-use","tag-variability","tag-weight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13318,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316\/revisions\/13318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}