Higher survival and increased productivity with balanced breeding

Animal Welfare, Productivity & Profit

In recent years, DanBred has intensified our focus on breeding for even more robust pigs with higher survival rates. The production results from herds with DanBred genetics show that you can get both higher survival and increased productivity with balanced breeding.

Over the past century, DanBred has developed a balanced breeding programme that strives to improve both animal welfare, sustainability and profits for pig producers worldwide. Therefore, the breeding goal is updated regularly to ensure that it continues to match how our industry develops. The changes are decided by the pig producers, who sit on the board of the Danish Agriculture & Food Council, Sector for Pigs.

Balanced breeding for robust pigs

In 2022, we introduced two new traits for piglet survival in the breeding goals. At that time, the expectation from our Breeding & Genetics department was that the breeding progress for piglet survival would lead to a 1 percentage point annual improvement in the coming years.

The latest production results confirm this forecast, as piglet survival has increased by 1 percentage point from 2022 to 2023. This shows that when we implement changes in our breeding goals, it leads to concrete improvements in the production herds.

This year, we have also implemented sow survival as a new trait in the breeding goals. Therefore, pig producers around the world can look forward to even more healthy, robust DanBred pigs in the future.

World-class finishers

Although we have increased our focus on robustness, we also to work to balance the traits in the breeding goal, so that you continue to have efficient finisher pigs in the barn.

The production results continue to show excellent results for the important finisher pig traits when you have DanBred pigs in your herd. This contributes to better utilisation of resources and ensures the lowest production costs for you.

Average results from DanBred’s top 5 herds: