Breeding goals (2/6): Efficiency

Efficiency is essential to secure more output for less input and thereby increase the sustainability of pig production in an economic, environmental, and social aspect. The breeding goal for efficiency is saved feed. Saved feed is the proportion of feed intake that is not used for production of daily body weight gain and backfat thickness, therefore it optimizes the amount of feed consumed for the same amount of meat produced which contribute to improvement of the efficiency in economic and environmental advantageous. Saved feed contributes to profitability and reduction of environmental emission. Reduction of feed costs is essential to increase the farmers profit since feed costs constitutes for around 60 % of the total costs in pig production with a range between 51 to 76 % in different countries (AHDB, 2018).

Saved feed for both the terminal and maternal lines

Danish Pig Genetics has a unique approach to register the feed intake of the individual pigs from a weight around 30 kg to 100 kg, using 270 Advanced Comput erized Electronic Feeding stations distributed across the different breeding herds. This approach allows feed intake data collection on a larger proportion of the population with high health status and as a result, better data quality, larger data quantity and therefore faster genetic progress on the population.

Saved feed is genetic residual feed intake approach where the feed intake is being corrected for energy used for daily growth of protein and fat deposition along with maintenance requirements using genetic regression coefficients. Therefore, saved feed is genetically independent  of production traits of growth and backfat thickness. It is expressed as gram of saved feed per day that is not used for maintenance, growth, and fat thickness.

It is thereby a method to select for pigs that produce the same amount of meat on less feed.

If you missed the last article, you could find it here:

1. Breeding goals (1/6): Introduction and philosophy