Keeping pigs alive sounds basic, but it may be the most powerful strategy you have for improving swine profitability and sustainability at the same time. From World Pork Expo, we sit down with Alltech’s Dr. Jose Soto to unpack why livability is the metric that quietly drives everything else: feed efficiency, growth performance, cost of production, and the stability of your whole pork production system.

We dig into Olerix, Alltech’s new proprietary blend of essential oils, and what the team is seeing around repeatable improvements in performance and, most importantly, survivability. Then we zoom out to the “Planet of Plenty” idea and ask what it looks like when you stop managing pork production as a set of isolated KPIs and start managing for throughput. When more pigs make it to market, the same labor and the same high-priced inputs generate more pounds of pork, which changes your economics fast.

The conversation also stretches beyond the barn. We talk about the National Pork Board partnership and the “Beyond the Pork Chop” seminar, where carcass utilization, pork fabrication, and changing global consumer demographics become part of the same story. Better use of the entire pork carcass can raise value per animal and reduce waste, while better feed efficiency helps reduce the carbon footprint tied to feed, one of the biggest sustainability drivers in swine.

If you care about swine nutrition, essential oils, feed conversion, livability, pork sustainability, and real-world farm margins, this one connects the dots. Subscribe, share this with a producer or nutritionist who’s fighting input costs, and leave a review with your biggest throughput question.