Favouring single shots over cocktails makes Hutterites the perennial winners of hog litter size contests, says a University of Alberta hog breeding specialist.
“It is no surprise to me at all that our Hutterite brethren that use natural mating clean us up every year in terms of pigs per sow per year,” George
Foxcroft, head of the University of Alberta’s swine reproduction and development program, said in an interview during the Manitoba Swine Seminar. “They’re actually using single sire mating.”
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During his presentation, Foxcroft said Hutterites using natural breeding and Dutch farmers using artificial insemination get much better pigs per litter results because they don’t mix sperm from many sires.
Most commercial hog operations in North and South America mix semen from a number of sires, which can drag down the average results.
Foxcroft said farmers have assumed that all breeding sires have close to the same effectiveness, or that good semen mixed with poor semen will make up for deficiencies, but these assumptions are false. The inclusion of bad boars in the stud weakens results and wastes semen.
“I think we are losing obscene amounts of semen,” he said.
Some boars in a pool will produce as few as nine piglets per litter, which is far beneath acceptable. On the other end of the scale, some will regularly produce more than 14 piglets per litter.
Foxcroft said farmers often hang onto poor boars because boar performance tests are becoming a thing of the past.
“We don’t evaluate any longer individual boars,” he said.
Pooled semen was introduced in North America along with AI as a “conservative way of avoiding disasters” because of the poor performance of one boar. However, most boar pools now contain high and low performers and production is cramped by the poor boars.
The Dutch ditched this problem after hog cholera ravaged their herds, leaving them with few boars and forcing them to maximize the impact of their best animals.
They began evaluating individual boars again, found the good ones and were able to drop semen shots from the “gold standard” three billion sperm to two billion.
Foxcroft said North American producers could increase their litter sizes by two piglets if they adopted boar evaluation again as part of an AI system.
After all, he said, that’s what the Hutterites are getting with natural breeding, and the claim of AI was that it could match natural breeding.
“We can’t actually match them,” he said. “They clean up all the prizes, and I think it’s because they use single sire mating.”
