Turning Up the Heat on Heat Detection

By Tyler Kelley, Pork Magazine - The higher your breeding herd's farrowing rate, the higher your profits. But faulty heat detection can cut into your farrowing rate and rob you of profits.

Improving farrowing rate by 5 percent can reduce nonproductive-sow days or let you generate the same productivity with fewer sows. It also could help you eliminate wrongful culling of sows for reproductive reasons that don't really exist.

"Improving heat detection industry wide could have a major effect on the industry's bottomline," says Wayne Singleton, Purdue University animal scientist.

Suppose a 2,500-sow farm breeds 150 sows or gilts a week, in order to farrow 110 litters weekly. Increasing the farrowing rate from 75 percent to 80 percent would allow the herd manager to reduce breedings from 150 to 137, which would help cut replacement gilt costs, says Ken Stalder, University of Tennessee swine specialist.

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