DeepLoop Team · 2026-09-28
Pig Growth Targets: The Target Moves With the Weight
'What's your target daily gain?' is the wrong question. A growing pig doesn't have one - it has a curve, and the number you should be hitting changes with every weight band.
The same shape, three times
Read three genetics programs' own tables side by side and the shape is the same every time. Daily gain climbs through the grower, peaks in the finisher, then eases off. Topigs Norsvin's TN Tempo curve runs from 657 g/day at 25 kg to a ~1,170 g/day peak near 100 kg, then back to ~1,070 by 150 kg. Feed conversion does the opposite - it only ever gets worse: Genesus gilts go 1.79, 2.50, 2.68, 2.84, 3.47 across the bands. PIC anchors it with three tiers per stage: grow-finish target 955 g/day at FCR 2.33, average 927, intervention 835.
They don't even agree where the journey ends
PIC targets 126 kg, Genesus 123-125, Topigs carries its curve to 150. Quote a 'finisher ADG' without its weight range and you're comparing three different journeys and calling them one. Peak gain splits too: Topigs' model potential of about 1,170 g/day against Genesus' field bands of 930-1,030. The number is meaningless without the weight band it belongs to.
Daily gain and FCR by weight band across PIC, Genesus and Topigs Norsvin - the same curve shape, redrawn from each program.
A camera drew the curve
A Chinese group ran a patrol depth-camera system over 106 pens of growing-finishing pigs and weighed the same pigs on the farm scale to check it. For 60-120 kg pigs the camera's mean error was 3.48 kg - about 3.71% - agreeing with the scale at r = 0.941 (P < 0.001). Because it weighed daily instead of every fortnight, its growth curve fit better than the manual one, with lower AIC and BIC. A daily curve can be differentiated: they located the inflection point - where daily gain stops accelerating and starts to fall - at 93.45 kg and 164.46 days, a maximum growth rate of 831.66 g/day.
From the depth-camera weighing study - daily camera weights fit the growth curve better than fortnightly manual weighing and located the inflection point.
One number for the barn, or a curve
Set a finisher target as one number for the whole barn and you are averaging across weight bands that each want something different. The programs quietly disagree on gilts vs barrows, on peak gain, on the endpoint - and a single barn-wide ADG hides all of it. The target is a curve; managing to a point on it means knowing where each pig sits.
Where this is heading
All of this is built on what each pig actually weighs - the number most barns measure twice in a whole finishing period. DeepLoop is working on reading it day by day, so the target you manage to is the curve the pig is actually on.