Over the past two decades, the popularity of artificial insemination in swine breeding has grown exponentially. While artificial insemination or “AI” has been more popular in larger farms for genetics and quality control purposes, it’s gained traction in smaller setups for economical reasons.

With AI, you don’t need to keep boars on hand, saving you space and feed costs.

In order for swine artificial insemination to be a success, proper preparation is needed. Before conception can happen, your gilts or sows need to come into heat, which requires a combination of patience, planning, and execution.

Waiting for the Right time

If you have gilts, you’ll need to wait for them to hit puberty and start cycling. This happens at around 8 months, though it can happen as early as 6 months. Once they reach that stage, they’ll cycle every 21 days.

For sows, they’ll typically start cycling around 5-7 days after her pigs are weaned.

Once the gilt has started cycling, she will show heat every 20-21 days (characterized by a swollen vulva and slightly uncharacteristic behavior of standing firm when pressing on her back). This only lasts 40-48 hours, so you should do artificial insemination twice during that window.

You Do Have Some Control

If you want to take a more hands on role and encourage your pigs to cycle at similar times, there are a few options.

One option is to load your gilts into a trailer, and take them on a ride for a few miles. This gets them rustled up a bit. When you’re done, bring them back to the farm and put them in a different pen than before. If possible, place a boar in a pen adjacent to them. Typically, they’ll start cycling 5-7 days later.

If you don’t have a boar, you can also purchase some boar odor in an aerosol can from a local farm supply store. You can spray them in the face with that, and they’ll usually show heat in 5-7 days. If a gilt is in heat, you can push on her back loin area and she’ll stand firm with ears erect or held still.

Pace Yourself

Swine artificial insemination shouldn’t be rushed. The process should last 10 minutes or more. This isn’t as difficult as it might sound, as female pigs stand very still during breeding while in heat if pressure is applied to her loin area. This simulates the pressure that a boar puts on her back during breeding.

If you need assistance or you just don’t want to stand in one spot for that long, there are clamps that can be attached to the loin area while the insemination is taking place.

Despite their smaller stature, boars actually ejaculate more semen than bulls do during mating. A boar may inject up to 100 ml volume of semen, which contains 50 – 100 million sperm.  Boar studs will collect the sperm, dilute it to the proper insemination dose, add a semen extender to ensure viability and cool it then ship it overnight to you.

Keep it Cool, but Not Frozen

When boar semen is frozen, it loses fertility. This makes the storing and transportation of boar semen a little tricky. The best way to ensure successful insemination is to have it shipped overnight, chilled but not frozen. Depending upon the boar, semen usually is viable for a week when shipped in a cooler chilled and diluted with a semen extender solution.

Since the sows are only in heat for 40-48 hours, you’ll need to make arrangements ahead of time with a boar stud operator to ship semen for the breeding event. Plan for the anticipated time you will induce the gilts to come into heat or sows will be weaned.

More Control to Come

Currently, there is new artificial insemination technology that can sort sperm into X and Y sperm so that the breeder can order sperm to produce exclusively gilt or boar pigs. In the swine world, this technology will soon be available, but it’s been available in cow artificial insemination for some time and yields nearly the same pregnancy rate as standard artificial insemination.

While swine breeding has a little ways to catch up, you can expect this to be a common trend in the near future.

In the meantime, you can still achieve great control in swine artificial insemination by following the professional advice and best practices. For more on raising pigs, whether it’s for show or for profit, check out my book Doc Sanders Goes Whole Hog.