Mark Rix

The topic of piglet survivability continues to be on the minds of most swine producers. There is not a week that goes by that an article does not appear on my computer from one of the many newsletters, digital trade magazines, university newsletters or websites providing information for the swine industry.

As mentioned in the last article, "Looking in depth into female culling and death loss," the swine industry continues to see increasing female death loss and culling. That article focused on using six categories for culling and death loss with data broke out by parity for farm analysis.

The swine industry continues to see increasing female death loss and culling of younger parity females over the last several years. There have been a lot of individuals, companies and groups looking at the reasons why and trying to come up with ways to lower both these numbers with many articles written. This article will be sharing data from two databases: SMS (Swine Management Services) and MetaFarms.