These piglets enjoy a spotless clean pen – daily practice is often more challenging for young piglets.
Fewer pathogens with egg immunoglobulins
For newborn pigs there are often a host of different challenges – think of crushing or contamination of the farrowing pen. For the last problem, solutions exist. A dietary approach can help to relieve pathogenic pressure through sow manure.
BY DR FELLIPE BARBOSA AND DR INGE HEINZL, EW NUTRITION T 24
he main objective of a piglet producer is to maxi- mise the number of healthy weaned piglets per animal per year. Nowadays, it is not difficult to find production systems delivering more than 30 piglets
weaned/sow/year. Combining strategies on management, feeding, and health of both piglets and sows, is crucial for increasing sow’s productivity. A unique environment that can determine the success of a piglet farm is the farrowing unit. It is important to reduce as much as possible losses during this period. Pre-weaning mortality must always be monitored and targets must be set. In European conditions, it ranges between 8-10%.
▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 34, No. 6, 2018
One important driver in reducing pre-weaning mortality is understanding the fragility of newborn piglets. At birth, the resources of a piglet are very scarce: low energy reserves and practically no immune defence against existing pathogens in their new environment. Problems are prone to happen and will be mostly caused by pathogens present in the environ- ment, in the feed, in the water and most important, in the faeces of the sow. The main contamination source for new- born piglets is their mother’s manure. And this first contami- nation can be quite severe causing diarrhoea and increasing piglet mortality. Together with crushing, diarrhoea definitely causes a high percentage of total losses during the first days of life. In most of the cases, the disease is caused not only by one agent but by a combination of enteric infections from different patho- gens or at least different strains of a pathogenic species. E. coli and clostridia are two of the most important diarrhoea causing pathogens during the first weeks after birth.
Pathogens during the first days E. coli is well known as one of the main responsible patho- gens for pre-weaning diarrhoea. And although it belongs to
PHOTO: EW NUTRITION
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