How to raise a healthy piglet

Oct 21, 2024

Raising healthy piglets is critical for successful swine production. Piglets are particularly vulnerable in the early stages of life, requiring a balanced approach to nutrition, environment, disease prevention, and overall management. The basis for a healthy piglet starts already with a healthy sow. In order to give the piglet the best conditions for a successful start, it is important to support intestinal development as early as possible in a positive way.

1. The sow

To give the piglet the best conditions for a successful start, it is important to support intestinal development as early as possible in a positive way – preferably even before birth through the mother sow’s diet. Targeted nutrition and feeding management can have a positive effect on the quality and quantity of colostrum.

Maternal imprinting, which refers to the transfer of microbes from the sow to the neonate during birth, suckle, and early life, helps to establish the neonate’s gut microbiome and shape the development of the gut barrier. The piglet‘s immune system development and, in turn, their growth and survival are influenced by the sow‘s microbiota.

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Video: Four Star Pork Industry Conf - Back to Basics: Fundamentals drive vaccine performance

At a time when disease pressure continues to challenge pork production systems across the United States, vaccination remains one of the most valuable and heavily debated tools available to veterinarians and producers.

Speaking at the 2025 Four Star Pork Industry Conference in Muncie, Indiana, Dr. Daniel Gascho, veterinarian at Four Star Veterinary Service, encouraged the industry to return to fundamentals in how vaccines are selected, handled and administered across sow farms, gilt development units and grow-finish operations.

Gascho acknowledged at the outset that vaccination can quickly become a technical and sometimes tedious topic. But he said that real-world execution, not complex immunology, is where most vaccine failures occur.