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Management Key to Maximizing Capture of Genetic Potential
Steffen Klenk - PIC Canada

Farmscape for April 28, 2017

The Western Canadian Accounts Manager with PIC Canada says herd management is the key to maximizing the genetic potential of today's more productive pigs.
"Capturing Genetic Potential at the Slat Level" was among the topics discussed earlier this week as part of the Prairie Swine Centre's 2017 Manitoba Spring Producer Meeting.
Steffen Klenk, the Western Canadian Accounts Manager with PIC Canada, says genetic improvement is constantly happening but, what we've seen over the past two to four years, is a much quicker rate of improvement.

Clip-Steffen Klenk-PIC Canada:
We're making more advances year over because we have some new tools to work with such as relationship based genomic selection for example and having a bigger population of animals to choose from.
The main point is we're trying to measure things more accurately so the more we know about our pigs and know their relationship to each other the more improvement we can make.
Obviously litter size is important.
If we don't have the pigs born we're never going to raise them but then we also want to look at trying to make sure can wean as many pigs as possible, getting pre-mortality down and then having pigs that perform well in the nursery and grow finish stage that are efficient, they grow quick and they have a good conversion and we keep the mortality at a minimum.
The performance we have today is like we've never seen before.
There's a lot of opportunity which economically is five to ten dollars per pig easily so I think we need to look at the tools we have, what is the best choice for you and then what management techniques do you need to implement to make sure you get the full potential out of those animals and have a successful operation.

Klenk says we've got a lot more productive animal that's got a lot more potential and we need to look at different strategies, whether that's how we feed the animal, how much space we give it, how much water, how we set up our barns to make sure we capture that performance.
He says you can have the best pig in the world but if you don't manage it right it's not going to do anything.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.


       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork

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