Pig farms spend heavily on vaccination, but few check whether that investment reaches the piglet through colostrum, writes Louise Blenkhorn, owner and director of Emerald Veterinary Health, a specialist pig practice in Yorkshire, in a Vet View column for Pig World.
Her first tool is the Brix refractometer. A few drops of colostrum give a Brix percentage within seconds, which can be recorded and compared between gilts and older sows, across parities and batches, and after changes to vaccination schedules, nutrition or controlled-exposure programmes. A reading above 20% is considered good quality and 22% excellent.
Good colostrum is only half the job, she writes: a sow can produce excellent colostrum while some piglets still get too little. Piglets should ideally take in 250g, with about 200g an important minimum, and blood sampling a piglet on day two shows whether it got enough. Larger litters make this harder, because each sow's colostrum is finite, and smaller or later-born piglets often miss out. Antibody levels in colostrum are highest soon after farrowing and fall fast, and a piglet's gut can absorb them only for a limited time, so the first hours count.
Cross-fostering, split-suckling and the timing of farrowing-house routines all affect each piglet's chance to suckle early. Commercial colostrum supplements help small, chilled or slow piglets compete at the teat but are "a helping hand, rather than a replacement for the real thing".
Measuring both quality and intake shows where to act, she writes: weak colostrum points to pre-farrowing management, vaccination timing, nutrition and farrowing; poor transfer points to piglet management and early litter routines. "Measure it, manage it, maximise it, and make it count."
Photo: Scott Bauer, USDA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Source: Pig World
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