ABSTRACT

The study investigated the effect of breed of sire on growth characteristics of exotic crossbred pigs in a humid tropical environment. Body weight and other body traits, namely body length (BL), height at withers (111W), heart girth (HG) and rear girth (RG) were measured biweekly for three months (12 weeks) on 96 crossbred progeny of twelve Large White (LW) sows mated with three different breeds of sire, namely Large White, Hampshire (HS) and Duroc (DC) in the ratio of 1:4. The data were analyzed with Analysis of Variance appropriate for Completely Randomized Design (C.R.D.) and significant means were separated with Duncan's New Multiple Range Test (DNMRT). There were significant (P<0.05) differences among the breeds of sire for BW, HG and RG at different ages. HS- sired progeny were superior to the progeny of the other breeds for most of the traits measured post weaning. The analysis shows that during pre- weaning phase, HS — sired progeny were superior in 48%, LW - sired progeny were superior in 40% and DC — sired in 12% in all the traits measured. HS- sired progeny were superior in 70% of all traits, while those of LW sires showed superiority in only 30% of the traits in the post-weaning phase. The Hampshire breed is recommended as the preferred sire breed for crossbreeding purposes to bring about genetic improvement in growth of pigs in a humid tropical environment. Regressions (R2 ) of body weights on Linear body measurement were all very highly significant (P<0.001) except at 70 days where R2was poor (10.5%). The determined prediction equation shows that BL and RG could be effectively used to predict body weight of pigs.