Improve sow survival in your herd
Do you also want robust sows that are easy to handle and wean many vital piglets? Improving sow survival is an important focus area for the pig industry worldwide. Higher sow survival is good for animal welfare as well as the pig producer’s bottom line.
SEGES Innovation has calculated a gain of €5.6 per sow per year for every one percentage point increase in sow survival in a herd. Improving sow survival with five percentage points in a herd with 1,000 sows could hereby contribute with €28,000 more annually.
For decades, DanBred has focused on longevity and conformation in the balanced breeding goals. In recent years, it has implemented a number of breeding initiatives that have contributed to more robustness and increased survival in pig production. And we have seen the effects with improvements in survival in both breeding and production herds.
The national average of Danish production herds already proves that the sow survival has increased by 0.3 percentage points from 2022 to 2023. We expect to see this progress continue in herds with DanBred genetics as the company has implemented ‘sow survival’ in the breeding goals for DanBred Landrace and DanBred Yorkshire in 2024.
Groundbreaking breeding method
DanBred’s Breeding & Genetics department, at the Danish Agriculture & Food Council, has researched new and innovative methods to improve the robustness of sows. As a results, ‘sow survival’ was implemented as a new trait in the breeding goal.
The technical work on sow survival is completely unique, as data is collected on at least 100,000 sows in DanBred’s commercial production herds annually.
“This is a groundbreaking piece of research that has been a major focus area in our department for the past five years. With the new breeding method that has been developed, we can now implement sow survival, which will contribute to more robustness of sows in production herds,” explains Tage Ostersen, Head of Department at Breeding & Genetics, Danish Agriculture & Food Council.
No other breeding company has the same innovative approach to sow survival where data is collected directly in production herds.
Annual improvement with new generations
The breeding progress for sow survival will manifest in production herds continuously over the coming years, while the effect of the breeding progress accumulates. The older sows in the production chain should be replaced with new generations of sows before the breeding progress will fully manifest in all DanBred sow herds.
“Even though the breeding progress for sow survival manifests continuously, producers will already notice a difference from today based on the breeding initiatives that we have introduced in recent years. This is because our models take into account all genetic correlations between the traits in the breeding goal, and because we have already introduced a new trait for piglet survival, which has a strong favourable correlation to sow survival,” says Tage Ostersen.
Larger data set contributes to better results
One of the innovative elements of the new breeding goal is that data is collected on at least 100,000 crossbred sows annually from the production herds that have DanBred Nucleus Management. In the breeding programme, completely new statistical and technical methods have been developed for handling data. In addition, data from the entire life of the sow – from the first mating to the last farrowing – are included in the breeding goal for sow survival.
“We have focused on developing the right methods. This means that we can utilise the large amounts of data from 100,000 sows annually. With this data basis, and the fact that the trait is measured in production herds, we know that we will see a greater breeding progress for sow survival in the herds,” explains Tage Ostersen.
Robust piglets with new breeding goals
After the company implemented a new breeding goal for piglet survival in the summer of 2022, pig producers noticed that the piglets are more robust and vital.
“For the past eight months, we have had litters with larger pigs. It’s nice to see that they’re doing better and, therefore, require less management,” Lene Wahl Meincke, manager in the farrowing unit at Overgaard Gods, states.
Results from DanBred production herds show an increase in piglet survival of 0.9 percentage points from 2022 to 2023.
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