Carlos Piñeiro

The improvement in prolificacy seems to be linked, in many cases, to a lower uniformity of the weights at birth.

It's necessary to promote a standardization of the causes of the losses/cullings of the sows. Some rules on which this standardization can be based on are proposed.

The registration of the sow losses/cullings in the management computer programs is normally something easy, but it is not always given the importance that it really has so, sometimes, the registration is incomplete, with wrong dates and without writing down the cause of the loss/culling. Nevertheless, its correct registration and its later analysis can give us very useful information for the correct technical-financial management of the farm.

In a very near future we will have an enormous amount of data with more speed and ease than ever, and also from very different origins.

Only the 17% of the companies use more than the 75% of the collected information and only the 27% of them think that they use it better than their competitors.

In previous articles we have talked about the importance of a good sow replacement, and we have explained methods to calculate an adequate sow replacement rate. In this article we are going to show an example of a bad replacement policy and its consequences throughout time on the productivity of the farm.

Normally, when we ask a farmer which is their average number of weaned piglets per sow they normally know this parameter, because its calculation is easy, nevertheless...

It is a widely documented fact that pig production has seasonal variations mainly focused on a descent in the reproductive efficiency in the gestation phase (difficulty in the coming into oestrus, a higher number of reproductive failures) during the summer and autumn months.

The losses due to diarrhoea problems appear concentrated, basically, during the first week in the weaners stage, whilst in the farms that have not suffered diarrhoea problems, the mortality is distibuted more evenly.

We analyze a real case, and we will check out how a partial analysis of the data can give place to erroneous conclusions.

In this second article we are going to analyze the causes of these locomotive system disorders and the treatments to avoid them or to minimize their effects.

Locomotor problems are serious, multi-factorial problems that aren’t well registered on farms, but for the most part are correctable.