February 21, 2025
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Dr. Seth Melson, a consulting veterinarian with Swine Vet Center, spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 50thLehman Swine Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA about how to best troubleshoot sow farrowing rates.
Why are farrowing rates so important?
Poor farrowing rates don’t just impact the number of piglet births; it also impacts pig costs and productivity of the farm. It leads to an increase in nonproductive days for sows which in turn increases feed cost per pig and how many pigs are actually marketed.
With feed costs at current prices, that means $0.05 per nonproductive day per sow on feed costs or per pig feed costs. When we break that down into pigs out the door, it’s about $0.30 per day. One sow cycle 21 days, so that’s $4.00 per pig by just adding on a cycle of nonproductive days. So, poor farrowing rates are very important to a producer’s economic productivity and feed pig costs coming out the door.
What are some of the strategies to improve poor farrowing rates?
First, start out with narrowing down the problem on the farm because I can’t help you improve until I know where that problem really lies on the farm.
Start with the records. One of the first things we look at is the records to see where the sows are falling out. Is it before preg check – those first 30 days – where we have a true conception problem? Or is it truly after the preg check where we have a falling out in late or mid-gestation? Where and at what point we have a true farrowing rate problem is important to determine.
Conception rate – review the breeding process. If we get on the farm and narrow down that it’s a conception rate problem, a lot of times I look at what specifically in that process is causing the poor conception rates. I meet with the team to discuss their breeding process, and we look at what they do daily and determine if it is consistent. The conversation includes everything from who’s inseminating sows to who’s preg checking, and what time of day these processes are occurring.
One of the most important things to look at in the breeding process is heat checking. Is it a consistent process, and are we inseminating the right sows? This helps narrow down if the problem is part of the process or how the semen is managed.
Semen handling. It’s important to review the process.
- What time of day are sows being inseminated?
- What’s the temperature of the semen? Generally, it should be between 16°C to 18°C.
- What’s the age of the semen. It should be less than five days of age and that can depend on the extender that you use in the semen
- How long do we have semen doses in a cooler? We need to be aware of when we’re taking that semen out into the gestation to use it.
- Do we have cold packs in the cooler? If it’s not staying the right temperature, it could kill some of the semen. Someone should check the temperature of the semen in the cooler every 20 minutes to ensure it remains viable.
Consider nutrition. Nutrition during the first 30 days is important. We need to review how much is fed after preg check and before preg check. Is that what the nutritionist recommends? It’s good to talk with a nutritionist and see if there is anything that we can or should change.
Mid to late gestation issue. If we’re looking at a true after preg check problem, we narrow down where it is happening. We start looking at whether it is right away, meaning 30 to 60 days or is during 60 to 114 days and what that difference means.
For the 30- to 60-day window, review the movements of sows and/or nutrition of sows, especially if group pen gestation is occurring. Lately, I’m also looking at where we’re mixing sows and how that process is managed.
During those 30 to 60 days when we combine sows, do we see a lot of aggression and fighting? Do we have enough food and water sources for them? Water has become a bigger issue in my mind. There should be one water space per 10 sows. If we don’t have enough, sometimes we’ll see some dropout.
If it’s after the 60-day mark, we’re looking at management of sows in that period and disease becomes a lot more important.
- Do we know the PRRS status or not? If not, then it’s time to take blood samples from sows, aborted sows, or look at a new sampling method called TOSc, which is tonsil scrapings. This is easy for the farm personnel to do themselves.
- Consider diseases like parvovirus and leptospirosis. Especially on an older farm, lepto is transmitted in the urine and that can cause abortions late.
If it is a disease issue, we discuss how to control it or eliminate it from the farm.
Whole herd pregnancy check. If we can’t figure out when the loss is occurring and we don’t have any data to tell us where it is, one of the more labor-intensive things we do, but it’s helpful, is a whole herd preg check.
On a smaller farm it can be a two-to-three-day process of preg checking the whole farm. On a bigger farm, we might take subsets of each breed group. We’ll check 50 to 100 animals in a group and try to narrow down the timing of the fallout plus a parity of the fallout if we can, just to help narrow it down.
Once you do narrow down the issue, then the challenge is to take whatever issue you find and solve it. To do that, it takes an incredible team. As a consulting veterinarian coming in one day a month or a couple of breeding times, I’m probably not going to be able to implement the solution, you really need someone there every day to push the team. What I can do is help train a team member by identifying who on that farm is going to push this daily and get the team bought in. If you don’t have a team bought in, I can offer advice and suggestions, but the team will likely go back to what they were doing before. So, identifying the team member that’s going to push it through and having a good buy in from the crew and the managers is super important.
How important is communication among the team?
Communication among the team not only for the people doing the breeding but the manager of the breeders and upper management plus the communication back to me as a veterinarian is super important. Along with communication, comes monitoring and recording the results as well as an on-farm monitoring of the farrowing processes. Often when we’re having problems on-farm, I’m checking in weekly as a veterinarian with the manager to determine what we are doing this week, and have we monitored the process. What is your breed lead saying on this on this problem and do we think it’s helping? Then it’s a long-term game of getting to the point where we have the monitoring records to show if it is helping or not. If it’s a conception rate problem, the lucky thing is we have 30 days so we know if we’re helping or not and we can continue with that group.
If it’s a true farrowing rate problem, we have late-term fallout. We don’t get to see that farrowing rate necessarily before that, but we can predict what farrowing rates are going to do by how many aborts we’re identifying, how many open animals we’re identifying in the pool, and monitoring weekly to decrease the amount of lag time so we know if we’re helping with our solutions or not.
Good record keeping is vital to fixing any problem. If I can’t measure it, I can’t manage it. So, looking at those records and saying, “Here’s the problem, here’s where it’s happening, are we fixing it or are we not?” Therefore, performing consistent monitoring and maintaining good records is so important.
This sounds a lot like a decision tree that you go through to really get to the core problem?
Determining if you have a farrowing rate problem is a very complex problem. It’s usually not simply here’s what you’re doing wrong or here’s the disease we’re dealing with, and we’re going to fix it this way. It’s usually a bunch of smaller things combining to make a bigger problem.
By using the decision tree, it allows you to not only identify the main problems and what to hit first, but how to proceed going forward. Once you fix the main problem, the decision tree guides you to the next problem and how to fix that area. The decision tree is important and often I will draw that out for producers so that we can outline a stepwise correction on what’s been happening.
For the farms who are trying to take their farrowing rate up to the top 10% in the US, it usually means looking at a bunch of small things that combine to make a bigger problem.
Improving farrowing rates pays off.
The value in fixing the farrowing rate and taking those nonproductive days down is critical, and it also gets the producer more pigs weaned per mated female per year. Getting that number to increase is important economically to the operation.