MSU Swine Center Ranked Fourth Nationally, First Among Land-Grants for Yorkshire Breeding

By Jack Falinski

Michigan State University’s Swine Teaching and Research Center has been recognized for a third year in a row by the National Swine Registry as the fourth highest Yorkshire recorder in the country, and the highest among all land-grant universities, with 138 litters.

For decades, MSU has been breeding Yorkshires, the most recorded breed of swine in the U.S. and Canada. Yorkshires, also known as the “Mother Breed,” provide a maternal line that most commercial hogs stem from today.

The MSU Swine Teaching and Research Center houses approximately 250 sows adult female pigs on site, with about 230 registered as purebred Yorkshires. About 50 sows are bred at the center each month, contributing to approximately 500-550 litters per year. Of those litters, roughly a quarter of them are purebred Yorkshires.

Kevin Turner, the center’s farm manager, said one of the goals of the Yorkshire breeding program is to preserve the breed’s purebred genetics and improve its traits for breeders and other commercial companies.

“I feel honored in the fact that MSU has been able to maintain and build upon a track record of great production-based, functional Yorkshires that allow our faculty to do some of the genomic research they wouldn’t be able to do on a commercial line,” Turner said. “The purebred world has shrunk, so to still be in it and be a prominent player in it highlights decades of work from not just me but many others who’ve come and gone to maintain and improve this herd.”

Breeding purebred Yorkshires allows MSU to be a leader within the swine industry, Turner said. Not only does it grant MSU faculty opportunities to advance Yorkshire genetics through research, but because the center is a bio-secure, closed facility that produces and maintains its own livestock, it positions MSU as a hub for the industry that would be a key player if a foreign animal disease outbreak took place in the U.S.