Lifetime reproductive performance in female pigs having distinct reasons for removal

Abstract

This study describes the reasons for removal of female pigs distributed across parity categories, and evaluates how parameters of lifetime productivity differ for females having distinct removal reasons. The study analyzed lifetime records from 7973 females. Those records were obtained from 28 herds from the PigCHAMP ® research database having high-quality data during a five-year period. Female life expectancy corresponded to 3.3 parities at removal or 1.6 years spent in the breeding herd. The most common removal reason was culling attributed to reproductive disorders (33.6%), followed by culling for sub-optimal litter performance (20.6%). Sows culled for old age (8.7% of the removals) spent proportionally fewer days in non-productive periods, and produced more weaned pigs annually and over a lifetime than females removed for other reasons ( P<0.05). In contrast, females culled for reproductive failure accumulated the largest proportion of non-productive days (NPD) during the time spent in the breeding herd, and produced the fewest weaned pigs per lifetime and per year ( P<0.05). These findings indicate that culling for reproductive reasons is more common among low-parity females, which suggests that minimisation of NPD at early reproductive cycles is crucial to optimise female lifetime reproductive efficiency.