Thank you to Angelos Kachrimanidis and all at Vethellas for inviting me to you seminar and thank you for all your good hospitality, business and comradeship over the past 24 years.
First and foremost, I am a farmer who has found I have the ability to improve breeding pigs, I am not a professor. I have exported breeding pigs to 58 countries to improve their pigs genetics. In this presentation I will be discussing the changes we have seen in the pig over the last 56 years and the strategies I have used in my own breeding programmes by combining the art and science of genetic improvement. It has been our goal to produce a pig that is economically improved, but is also easy to manage across the world. I will look at the results I have achieved and the success reported by my customers. If I had another life I would love to breed racehorses and correct the racehorse breeding policies.
The improvements in the pig have been dramatic, in 2010 1kg of feed produces 2.7 times more lean meat than it did in 1960. Pigs grow faster and feed conversion ratio (FCR) has improved from 3.2 to 2.3. We have seen changes in the carcass composition with the lean meat percentage improving from 48% to 63%.
