By Imke Leemans, Global Genetic Specialist
Balanced breeding has been the foundation of the Topigs Norsvin breeding program for decades and will remain so for decades to come. Genetics is a powerful tool for supporting a sustainable and profitable pork production value chain by creating small improvements that accumulate over the generations to realize a substantial impact. The Topigs Norsvin balanced breeding approach is applied to all maternal and terminal sire lines.
Imke Leemans has been Global Genetic Specialist at Topigs Norsvin since 2021. She holds a master’s degree in animal sciences from Wageningen University and Research. In her role, she delivers genetic support to Germany, Switzerland and four boar-producing farms located in the Netherlands. She also contributes to various projects related to animal robustness.
In a nutshell, what are the key benefits of balanced breeding?
Balanced breeding benefits
I believe balanced breeding helps customers boost their profits, enhances pig welfare, and reduces the strain on our planet’s resources by continuously improving efficiency.
Data-driven balanced breeding
Modern breeding is all about data. Topigs Norsvin therefore collects extensive sets of data across its breeding farms. For instance, piglets born at nucleus farms are weighed at birth through our piglet weighing protocol. Birth weight and its variability within a litter are key factors that influence later productivity and contribute to developing more robust animals. We also record piglet survival, cross-fostering, and other relevant factors. This allows us to assess the mothering ability of sows and piglet vitality, information that we feed directly into our breeding goals. Thanks to these data, we can produce robust, uniform piglets at birth that are well-positioned to become full-value pigs at slaughter.
How has balanced breeding improved piglet survival?
Improved piglet survival
That story started 25 years ago when Topigs Norsvin incorporated farrowing and preweaning survival into its breeding program. Furthermore, we believe that every piglet born should survive until weaning. Therefore, as litter sizes grew, we ensured that the number of teats increased so that sows could nurse all their piglets.
Does balanced breeding cover the entire life cycle?
Robust finishers
There’s no point getting off to a flying start if you cannot finish the race. So, our breeding efforts also cover the finisher phase. Here, we select for enhanced robustness under high and conventional health conditions via traits like nursery and finishing survival and under disease-challenged conditions via selection for enhanced resilience to PRRS challenges. We minimize losses by focussing on strong exterior and leg quality traits, healthy joints by minimizing osteochondrosis collected from our CT-scanners and breeding against congenital defects in our breeding program.
Finally, can you give an example of how balanced breeding has improved a Topigs Norsvin line?
In my opinion, the TN70 sow is a superb example of balanced breeding (Figure). Over the past five years, we have witnessed an 0.8% improvement in survival rates to weaning. Also, the number of teats per sow has progressed with the increase in litter size, in fact the number of teats went up more than the number of live born piglets, which boosts animal welfare because the sow can successfully nurse all of her piglets.
