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.
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