The farrowing interval — the time between one farrowing and the next — is the production cycle’s clock. Every day the clock runs represents feeding cost, housing overhead, and labor…
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The scenarios that require milk replacer feeding in a commercial pig farrowing house arrive without warning and demand an immediate response. A sow that dies during a complicated farrowing, leaving…
Crushing — the death of a piglet when the sow lies on it, rolls onto it, or shifts her body weight over it — is the leading cause of pre-weaning…
In every commercial sow herd, every farrowing produces piglets that are measurably smaller than their littermates at birth. In most litters, the smallest piglet is 30–50% lighter than the average…
Weaning is the only production event in the pig’s life that imposes four simultaneous stressors at once: the abrupt cessation of the sow’s milk; removal from the sow and the…
No other nutritional intervention available to a commercial pig farm has the biological significance of the colostrum a piglet receives in its first hours of life. Not the most precisely…
The first week of a piglet’s life is the window during which a series of management procedures are performed that will influence its health, welfare, identification, and market value for…
The term “golden hour” is borrowed from emergency medicine, where it describes the critical window immediately following trauma when rapid, correct intervention most dramatically affects the probability of survival. In…
Farrowing is the most time-sensitive management event in commercial pig production. The difference between a stockperson who arrives at the farrowing house to find a sow halfway through an unattended…
The number that matters most in commercial pig production is not litter size at birth — it is the number of piglets that survive to weaning. A sow that farrows…