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Zinpro® Corporation, the world’s leading innovator and manufacturer of high-performance organic trace minerals and animal nutrition solutions, has launched the Zinpro Sow Excellence Index – the swine industry’s first data-driven benchmarking system. Designed to prove a correlation between claw lesions and sow productivity, the index allows producers to catch issues early before they impact pig performance.
“Claw lesions are a silent problem with loud consequences,” says Dr. Lucas Rodrigues, Zinpro discovery researcher, Swine Research and Discovery. “Our multivariate analysis revealed that sows with poor claw health such as heel overgrowth and white line lesions consistently underperform in farrowing metrics. The Zinpro® Sow Excellence Index empowers producers to act earlier, not later.”
How the Zinpro Sow Excellence Index works
Supported by one of the world’s largest sow-focused databases, the company developed the Zinpro Sow Excellence Index utilizing data from more than 30,000 individual sow assessments across multiple countries and continents.
Using the Lesion Index (L-Index), a standardized way to measure lesion severity and frequency, the Zinpro Sow Excellence Index establishes benchmarks that can be used to evaluate herd health and longevity. Swine producers worldwide can now benchmark their farms against a global dataset and receive customized L-Index reports through a Zinpro® Feet First® evaluation. The Zinpro Sow Excellence Index then reveals how claw health directly correlates with productivity, longevity and welfare, turning lesion scores into actionable insights for herd performance.
Checking for claw lesions takes less than a minute per sow and can be built into a routine check to assess sows during lactation. If lesions are identified, producers can quickly adjust nutrition, housing or management to limit lost performance.
From symptom to signal
“The Zinpro Sow Excellence Index transforms claw lesion scoring from a diagnostic tool into a strategic production indicator,” says Dr. Ton Kramer, Zinpro South America business manager. “It empowers producers and technicians to act early to benchmark production, allowing them to improve sow longevity and performance.”
The Zinpro Sow Excellence Index offers the following benefits to producers:
- Provides early warning before lameness hits to bolster herd health
- Quantifies monitoring through advanced data analysis and supports better decision-making for swine production systems
- Links predictive insights to lifetime productivity, enabling systems to quantify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most
- Strengthens welfare credibility and reinforces the Zinpro commitment to sustainability
Now the global swine industry has a tool to help demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between claw health and reproductive performance under real world conditions. Producers can benchmark against top- performing herds, prioritize claw health interventions and improve sow longevity and lifetime productivity.
November 11, 2025 - Zinpro
