Management strategies to reduce piglet pre-weaning mortality

Introduction Nowadays, swine production in Thailand has become more industrialized and the number of total born piglets per litter increase rapidly during the past decade. One of the most important factors to achieve a successful swine farming industry is to optimize farrowing management. The key success for intensive farrowing management include, among other factors, a proper farrowing supervision, farrowing intervention of sows with dystocia, care of newborn piglets and optimization of cross-fostering management. The swine genetics in Thailand is mostly imported from Europe, mainly from Denmark. Due to the improvement of genetic selection of high prolific sows in Europe (1), litter size in sows in commercial swine herds in Thailand has been dramatically improved during recent years (Figure 1). Therefore, farrowing management practices and care of newborn piglets are becoming a new focus of interest in the swine research area (2).