PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF AI TECHNOLOGY
Posted in: Pork Insight Articles, Production by admin on May 12, 2017
The widespread adoption of artificial insemination (AI) with stored boar semen has become an important production management tool in the Canadian swine industry.
The current AI industry is built upon the use of liquid semen stored in extenders that provide commercially acceptable fertility rates for a period of several days. For much of the last two decades, common practice has been to store extended semen at 17°C and perform 2-3 intracervical inseminations/estrus cycle using 1.5-3 billion sperm in a large volume (~70 ml). The swine industry has adopted production practices and the infrastructure required to produce, distribute and store these high quality semen doses from genetically superior boars at an economically viable cost.
CRYOPRESERVED SEMEN
In addition to the advantages of using liquid semen for AI, it also provides: the ability to plan inseminations, efficiencies in the import/export of genetics, control of disease transmission, long-term genetic banking, genetic transfer between nucleus herds and can function as a backup in case of a disaster.
SEX SORTED SPERM
A potential complementary technology for the use of frozen-thawed boar sperm and/or low dose inseminations may be the use of sexed sperm. The benefits of sexed sperm to producers would be the production of more female piglets and a reduction in the number of male piglets that would need to be castrated.
CONCLUSIONS
In the near future, adopting the use of cryopreserved and/or sex-sorted sperm in combination with low dose insemination procedures, even in limited instances, may allow producers to exploit specific advantages they offer to their particular production circumstances.