Weather fronts impact on gestation and death in the domestic pig

Abstract

It has been shown in previous studies that heat stress has a negative effect on implantation of the foetuses and fertility in general. (Aggarwal and Upadhyay 2013) But the effect of fronts on reproductive parameters has never been analysed before. Some pig farmers and practicing veterinarians has stated correlations between an increasing number of farrowing sows and cold fronts while others has considered it as old suspicion. The cold front significantly increased the odds of more than six farrowing per day on the day of a front. This result seems to be consistent with that practitioners’ beliefs that a cold front increases the daily farrowing number. This impression may come from the fact that a daily farrowing number higher than 6 is relatively rare (Fig 3-A). When it occurs the farmers search for an explanation and they seem to have connected the phenomenon with the occurrence of a cold front, and our statistical analysis agrees with this observation.