Everyone wants more live pigs. Most pig producers put a lot of time and effort into keeping pre-weaning mortality as low as possible. Through improving management around farrowing and in early lactation, mortality has been reduced from the mid-teens to around 10% with the best stock people achieving single figures. Achieving a low mortality is given priority because of a simple relationship between the more pigs sold the greater the profit.
What is strange is that no one views pre-weaning feeding as a way of reducing mortality. If you had asked me a few years ago if pre-weaning feeding could lower mortality I would have answered 'unlikely'. But working with customers with big litters has changed my mind. It must be five years ago that the more progressive producers started to ask me for help due to falling weaning weights and increasing mortality as their litter sizes increased. Traditional creep feeding was not really helping, so much of my early efforts centred around offering supplementary milk feeding in every farrowing crate. This approach was very effective, producing more and heavier pigs from every litter. However, the cost and time with such an approach was prohibitive (I calculated breakeven to be around 13.5 born alive) resulting in a slow uptake by pig farmers. A common request was for a pellet that would do the same job, require no extra equipment and be straightforward to use.
Accelerators and pre-weaning mortality
It seems unlikely that a pelleted pre-weaning diet could reduce pre-weaning mortality but accelerators are proving to be very effective at bringing more pigs to weaning. In our trials, we were not looking for mortality benefits but instead focussed on lifetime performance and we did not notice the mortality benefit at first. Mortality was reduced in academic trials (but we ignore those because they have such good facilities and extra staff), then when mortality reduction was even greater in farm trials we still viewed it as solving temporary issues specific to those farms at that time rather than it being a universal effect. It came as something of a revelation when the same mortality reductions began to appear in our international trials. Mortality reduction is proving statistically significant and repeatable across farms across different countries - and is worth a lot of money.
Cost effective. Easy to use.
We had discovered a breakthrough in mortality that for once is both cost effective and easy to use. With litter size increases between 0.25 – 0.4 piglets per litter there is a minimum of a 3:1 payback (even at current low meat prices) from mortality reduction alone. Remember accelerators have been developed to improve lifetime performance beyond weaning through epigenetic changes and so additional income from pre-weaning mortality is a bonus.
Our findings are backed up by classic work on pre-weaning mortality from around 30 years ago which showed the number of piglet deaths listed as starvation was around 25% of all deaths. That means starvation contributes to around 0.325 piglet losses per litter, a prediction almost identical to what accelerators are saving. After ignoring the pre-weaning effect of accelerators as a side issue it now has my full attention!
