"Gilt Pool Management for Optimal Profit" was discussed last month in Winnipeg as part of the 2016 Manitoba Swine Seminar.

Dr Mark Wilson, a member of the Research and Nutritional Services Team with Zinpro, says selecting gilts to bring into the breeding herd will have a major influence on productivity.

Dr Mark Wilson-Zinpro:

One of the biggest factors is to make sure that, if you're raising your own gilts, is to make sure you pick the biggest gilts from a litter.

You will find that the gilts that are born with a larger size will tend to carry on the rest of their lifetime and have high productivity.

If we talk about your purchasing gilts, it's very important to purchase gilts that are in good body rig.
They're growing at a decent rate of gain, at least 650 grams per day up to 750 to 800 grams per day for their rate of gain so they can get to a very mature size by the time that they reach the 135 kilogram weight range.

What you'll also find is that gilts, the first ones to come into estrus, tend to be our highest productive females lifetime of all the females so it's important to have early heat detection on these gilts and understand heat no serves and make sure that these gilts are coming in with a status that you know you're going to have probably a high fertility female.

We'd like to have most of our animals to have had a determined heat check somewhere between 170 and 190 days and then have breeding occur on the very next cycle, on our second heat cycle.

Dr Wilson says those factors seem to have a very big relationship with long term productivity of these females.