What is the cost and where can I get artificial insemination?
A pig being injected with semen. PHOTO/COURTESY.
What you need to know:
- Semen must be hygienically collected using proper methods and must be processed to ensure fluid consistency, sperm quantity, motility and quality.
I keep more than 100 pigs on my farm. They have started multiplying but recently, an agronomist advised me to consider using artificial insemination. What is the cost and where can I get the services. Stephen
Dear Stephen (Answered by Christopher Mulindwa – Vet PNR Farms Africa)
A dose of artificial insemination from most service providers goes for about Shs50,000, which is far more cost effective than keeping a boar.
The use of natural insemination is quickly fading out due to a number of reasons including; the high costs of maintaining boars on farms and the limitation of the boar to a given number of services per week. This makes business complicated for commercial farmers.
Boars also lead to transmission, of diseases, most especially sexually transmitted infections. Where village boars are used, there is higher risk of African Swine Fever transmission especially among farms where vaccination schedules are not respected.
Genetics upgrade is only by purchase of new boars ,which is expensive, risky and time consuming.
There are people working hard to ensure farmers in Uganda access affordable artificial insemination services. However these people are facing a number of challenges and to make matters worse, their customers usually turn against them whenever heat repeats in inseminated gilts and sows.
Farmers think that the success of artificial insemination only depends on the expertise of the inseminator! This is not true; the success of every AI operation depends on how good the process is handled from semen collection to insemination. Three key persons in the process are concerned; let me list them in their order of importance; the boar stud owner, the farmer and the Artificial Insemination service provider.
Semen must be hygienically collected using proper methods and must be processed to ensure fluid consistency, sperm quantity, motility and quality.
The farmer must ensure that all pigs to be inseminated are actually on heat. Farmers need proper information on heat detection. It is very easy for a pig to be inseminated past its conceptive period most especially when a money minded technician is used.
The most difficult question to answer currently is; who is the reliable semen supplier in Uganda? We almost have no organised semen production businesses in Uganda.
This does not mean there is nobody trying to provide the services. It means that whoever supplies the semen or gives the artificial insemination services is doing it with a lot of difficulty.
