An interdisciplinary team of research and extension students, staff and faculty is bringing a 5-year research project focused on identifying causes of mortality on U.S. sow farms to a close with encouraging results.
Improving Pig Survivability is funded by NPB and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and has been working to understand contributing factors to pre- and post-weaning survivability with an end goal of developing targeted strategies to reduce overall mortality rates in the commercial swine industry.
The effort has been hugely successful. For example, one outcome determined that monitoring and early detection of lameness, sickness and other causes of mortality in high-risk sows led to a 25% decrease in mortality rate.
This investment has inspired the creation of many resources for producers, including on-farm training materials, factsheets, informational videos, the PigX podcast and more.
