Swine

Genomic Evaluation of Sow Stayability Traits from Second to Fifth Parities in Purebred and Crossbred Pig Populations

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Abstract

Sow longevity in commercial herds reflects the sustained functional and reproductive capacity of females across multiple productive cycles. It results from the interaction among genetic, environmental, and management factors. Among the measures used to evaluate this trait, stayability is a binary trait describing the ability of a sow to remain in the herd until a specific time point. Four definitions of stayability were evaluated: survival up to the second (STAY2), third (STAY3), fourth (STAY4), and fifth (STAY5) parities. The objective of this study was to estimate variance components and genetic parameters for these stayability traits in purebred and crossbred pig populations. Pedigree and genomic data were used, including 5,378,363 animals in the pedigree and 22,925 genotyped animals. Phenotypic data comprised 20,905 records for STAY2 (14,786 purebred Landrace; 6,119 Landrace x Large White crossbred) and 26,441 for STAY3-STAY5 (14,787 purebred; 11,654 crossbred). Variance components were estimated using Bayesian information based on the Gibbs sampler and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in the GIBBSF90+ software. The model was l = Xb + Za + e, where l is the vector of stayability liability; b is the vector of systematic effects including contemporary group (herd, season, and year of birth), age at first farrowing, dam parity for STAY2, and line for the combined analyses of purebred and crossbred sows; a is the vector of additive genetic animal effect; X and Z are the incidence matrices; and e is the vector of random residuals. MCMC chains ran for 500,000 to 1,000,000 iterations, with burn-in of 150,000 to 600,000 and thinning intervals of 10 to 80. Convergence was assessed by visual inspection and by the Heidelberger & Welch and Geweke criteria in the "boa" R package. Variance components and genetic parameters were obtained as posterior means using the PostGibbsf90 software. For STAY2, the proportion of successes was 68.02% in purebred and 75.75% in crossbred sows. For STAY3, success rate was 39.80% in purebred and 54.54% in crossbred sows. For STAY4, 23.23% of purebred and 36.89% of crossbred sows remained in the herd, while for STAY5, stayability dropped to 13.23% and 25.60% for purebred and crossbred sows, respectively. Heritability estimates were moderate across traits. In the combined analyses, estimates were 0.19 (0.15-0.22) for STAY2 and STAY3, 0.21 (0.17-0.25) for STAY4, and 0.20 (0.16-0.24) for STAY5. When analyzed separately, the estimates for the purebred population were 0.22 (0.18-0.26) , 0.23 (0.19-0.27), 0.25 (0.21-0.29) , and 0.24 (0.19-0.30) for STAY2-STAY5, respectively. In crossbred sows, were 0.08 (0.03-0.14), 0.13(0.07-0.18), 0.18 (0.12-0.26), and 0.23 (0.15-0.31) for STAY2-STAY5, respectively. These results indicate that stayability is moderately heritable and can be included in pig breeding programs aiming to improve sow longevity.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

da Silva, M., Veroneze, R., de Oliveira, H., Chen, C., Bhatnagar, A., Holl, J. & Brito, L., (2026) “Genomic Evaluation of Sow Stayability Traits from Second to Fifth Parities in Purebred and Crossbred Pig Populations”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2285968. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.23826

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