Prediction of porcine male fertility

Abstract

Life starts with fertilisation. Variation in fertility is caused by both farm and sow related parameters and boar and semen related parameters. Therefore, achieving high fertility is not obvious. Predominantly, artificial insemination (AI) is used for breeding pigs. The advantage of AI is that you can dilute semen from high fertile breeding boars and in this way inseminate many sows. The last years, the pig industry is increased in scale and evaluated in specialisation. Unfortunately there is no golden standard concerning the requirements for qualitative good semen. This thesis handles different semen quality characteristics in relation to fertility, showing that the effect of semen quality characteristics on the variation in fertility is relatively small. These effects seems small, but the economic value in a high producing pig industry is large, with the objective to minimise the variation between farms. Assessing semen quality characteristics objectively and relate them to field fertility leads to an efficient production of insemination doses, which results in an efficient spreading of the genetic genes. Semen motility assessed with CASA (Computer Assisted Semen Analysis) and analysing DNA damage are semen quality parameters which show a relation with fertility, in high fertile breeding boars. The value of these tests is possibly even higher in a population in which less selection is performed, added with other tested parameters from this thesis. The conclusions in this thesis contribute to the development of semen quality assessments which improve the prediction of porcine male fertility.