Coconut Water Aids Artificial Insemination in Pigs, Improves breeding, Meat Quality, Researchers Say

Some researchers have said using nutrient-rich coconut water to artificially inseminate female pigs can improve breeding and meat quality of the offspring. The researchers stated this at the end of a project in Uganda, saying they conceived the community action project after realising that most smallholder pig farmers keep poor breeds resulting in low growth rate, few piglets produced, and poor-quality pork with little lean meat and high-fat content. Speaking, the project’s lead researcher and senior lecturer at the department of animal production, Uganda’s Gulu University, Elly Ndyomugyenyi said artificial insemination involves the collection of semen from superior boars artificially for genotype improvement, and higher productivity. Explaining the research procedures, he noted that the farmers took fresh coconut water from five-month-old fruit known to be rich in nutrients such as sodium and potassium, adding that the water was used to aid insertion and delivery of the semen into the female pig’s reproductive canal. “High concentration of sodium and potassium in green coconuts is a factor which helps in sperm motility and longevity. Coconut fruits are readily available in the local markets. They are sold like other local fruits,” Ndyomugyenyi added. Also, he explained that the extraction was done by opening the fruit with a sanitised blade, after which the water was poured into a clean beaker before it was transferred using a cotton cloth. According to him, artificial insemination using coconut water can be adopted sustainably and scaled up anywhere else, especially among smallholder farmers, this is mainly because coconut fruit is in almost every part of the African continent. Ndyomugyenyi informed that the project, which is an initiative of Uganda-based Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), started in 2017 and has engaged nearly 1,000 smallholders in Uganda. On his part, Anthony Egeru, who heads the community project at RUFORUM, noted that farmers under the project had been trained on better husbandry and are now organised into a pig farmers’ association. He said, “Natural mating using boar (male pigs) comes with a myriad of risks including disease transmission and inbreeding that leads to poor quality offspring. “It exposes pigs to the deadly African swine fever virus because of the movement of boars from one place to another. In many instances, a whole village can use one or two boars to mate sow, increasing the risk of transmitting diseases,” Egeru noted. In an interaction with SciDev.Net, a pig production expert at the department of animal science, Egerton University, Kenya, Joab Malanda, said aside aiding the insemination process, coconut water helps to increase the number of viable live spermatozoa cells and extend their lifespan. He explained, “Outside a boar’s body, the spermatozoa will live for about four hours, after which they start to die due to starvation and temperature change, but when it is added to coconut water, they will live for up to 96 hours, allowing insemination at the appropriate time. “Coconut water also allows multiplication, as an average of 200 milliliters of semen harvested from a boar can be divided up to ten times, meaning that a single ‘ejaculation’ can inseminate ten sows as opposed to one in natural mating. “But for farmers to do the insemination, they have to be trained on the extraction of the semen [and] its preservation,” Malanda added.