Relationships between backfat thickness and reproductive efficiency of sows: A two-year trial involving two commercial herds fixing backfat thickness at breeding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we established whether controlling backfat thickness at breeding over a long time period can result in optimized reproductive performance in sows. Two commercial herds were used: herd A (322 purebred Landrace sows) and herd B (337 cross-bred Yorkshire-Landrace sows). Backfat thickness at breeding and farrowing, along with reproductive data [live Born (LB), stillborn, mummified, piglets alive at 48 h (LB48) and the weaning-to-estrus interval (WEI)] were collected over nine parities. The herd B producer was more successful in maintaining a steady backfat thickness at breeding than was the herd A producer. At breeding, the backfat thickness of sows from herd A showed a marked decrease between parities 2 and 5. During their first parity, these sows gained the least backfat during gestation and lost the most backfat during lactation. Sows from herd B had more LB and LB48 than sows from herd A. In herd A, a longer WEI was found in first and second parity sows. Our results demonstrate that maintaining backfat thickness throughout the reproductive cycle is more important than fixing this parameter at breeding alone. This is particularly true for gilts, which are prone to mobilize fat tissue reserves, a condition associated with declining reproductive performance. Key words: Backfat thickness, reproductive performance, sow, weaning-to-estrus interval
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".