Scale-up piggery

tkoSystems Resort Farms

KO-WA resort farms

How to Achieve high litter size and wean them

Dear farmers, Good breeds of gilts can go as far as 24 piglets on first farrowing and at the same time give you 4 piglets.

Your management of breeding stock and breeding records plays a significant role on how many piglets are Farrowed by your gilts.

To achieve good litter size, revise the following;

(1) Improve on your feeds and nutrition for the breeding stock, serve right quality and quantity of feeds to your breeding gilts throughout their life time in your farm.

(2) Cull off (sell) all the sows feeding on good feeds yet not farrowing good quality and low litter size i:e 7 piglets.

(3) Get rid of any other thing that brings stress to the breeding stock, i.e aggressive employees, bullies among sows, sows and boars staying together among others.

4). Vaccinate breeding gilts and boars against infections leading to stillbirth and weak piglets.

5). Feed gestating sows properly throughout the gestation period and increase feeds during Lactation to prevent piglets from suckling all the sows energy. (6kgs daily during lactation would be just perfect).

6). Introduce creep feeds to piglets at 10 days to prevent them from over straining the sows and wean them at 21-30 days using palatable feeds that can easily be digested by those small fellas.

7). Slowly improve on your breeding stock by; scaling up using artificial insemination, buying commercial crosses like F1 and F2 of LYD (landrace,Yorkshire,Duroc), YDD, TN60, TN70 among others that come with ability to litter high numbers.

8). Avoid inbreeding (breeding between closely related pigs)

9). Avoid over crossing again which may lead to the lose of the original characteristics like high litter size,Fast weight gain as in the maternal stock.

10) Build a piglet raising system based on nutritional requirements of piglets to grow. ( of what use is high litter size if you cannot raise them?) Learn to Reduce the percentage of mortality rate as you continue to flourish in piglet production and management.

11 Never stop learning and looking for information on how to improve your farm. Join as many farming groups as possible, be open minded and humble enough to learn.

God bless we wish you the very best in your farms.
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