TrueTrac Show Pig Joint Supplement

You have seen this, and you knew what it meant

You have a really nice barrow. Then one day he is standing at the feeder shifting back and forth, side to side, like he cannot get comfortable on his feet.

You know what is coming next.

Most people file that under “he is just getting heavy.” He is getting heavy. That is not what the shifting is.

The hairpin turn

The blood vessels that feed the growth cartilage make a hairpin turn on their way in.

Inflammation in that spot puts pressure on the turn. You know what happens to the water when a garden hose kinks. That is what happens to the blood supply feeding the growth plate, and a growth plate that gets shorted while the animal is still building is a train wreck you do not see until later.

That is the shifting at the feeder. Not a sore foot. A joint that is being built badly while you watch him eat.

The finish is the problem

Inflammation in that hairpin turn climbs when gain climbs. It climbs when you start pushing for finish. And it climbs hardest when you feed a beta agonist, because of the free radicals and the oxidation that come with it.

Read that again, because it is the trap in this whole sport.

The very thing you need to be competitive is the thing that damages the joints you are being judged on.

Nobody is going to stop pushing for finish. That is the game. It just means the joint side has to be handled deliberately instead of hoped about.

And this is not rare. Look at joints at slaughter and a very high percentage of both pigs and cattle show damage to the growth plate and the joint cartilage. Most of it never announced itself.

It is almost never a bug

When a show pig goes lame the reflex is to think something got in him. It usually did not.

The root causes of lameness in show pigs are osteochondrosis, degenerative joint disease and osteoarthritis. They are more than ten times more common than infectious causes like mycoplasma.

That is not a sickness you treat. That is a joint wearing out under an animal built to grow fast and asked to carry it.

We ran this ourselves, and the number that matters is not the one you would expect

In the spring of 2019 we put growing show pigs into three groups.

We scored clinical lameness daily on a 0 to 5 scale, from no clinical evidence up to non-weight-bearing. We measured range of motion weekly. And we followed pigs from each group to slaughter and opened up the joints.

The most severely affected pigs in the control group had complete erosions of the articular cartilage. That is a bone-on-bone joint surface, in a market-weight show pig.

Read the middle number again, because it is the one nobody talks about. Starting late still helped. It just gave up 42% of the benefit against the same product started on day one. Same pigs, same bag, same everything. The only variable was the date.

True North Technologies internal trial, spring 2019. Full write-up: Why we recommend feeding TrueTrac from day one

Lubricating the joint after the fact is not enough

Most joint supplements in this category are glucosamine and chondroitin. That is lubrication, applied to a joint that is already being damaged, and it does not touch the inflammation doing the damage.

TrueTrac was built the other way around.

In 2015 a group of researchers from Texas A&M and several private companies looked at chelated trace minerals as an intervention and a prevention for degenerative joint disease, osteoarthritis and osteochondrosis across several species including swine. In sows and gilts, chelated trace minerals cut culling for lameness by more than 35%.

That study is not about TrueTrac. It is about why TrueTrac begins where it does. We started with the mineral foundation and built the rest on top of it.

The Clean Formula

A pretty label does not mean a clean formula. What a company leaves out matters as much as what it puts in.

A lot of joint supplements in this category are built on green-lipped mussel. It carries thiaminase, an enzyme that breaks thiamin down.

In a pig, short thiamin slows gut motility. That is the barrow who quits doing his business, and nobody can work out why. You will chase that for a week and never once think about the joint supplement you are feeding him.

So we leave it out. Out of the pig product, out of the cattle product, out of the lamb and goat product. We do not add thiamin to chase the problem. We just refuse to put in the ingredient that tears it down.

A customer wrote in this spring certain we had made a mistake

He was new to us. He opened his TrueTrac, looked at the scoop, and was sure we had put the wrong one in the bag. It was way too small.

We had not made a mistake. That scoop is the whole point.

Your pig only eats so much in a day, and everything in that feeder is competing for the same room. A supplement that is mostly carrier does not just cost you money, it takes up space the feed was going to occupy. So we build the other direction: nothing in the bag that is not doing a job, and a dose sized to what the animal actually needs rather than to what looks generous in your hand.

He fed it all season.

Pick by how much time you have left

The 3 pound bag is about 150 days for one pig. A show pig project runs about that. So one bag is one pig, from the day he comes home to the day he walks in the ring, which is exactly the way the trial above was run.

The 20 ounce bag is about 60 days. That is for the person who is already partway into a season and knows he is not going to use a big bag. Nothing wrong with that, and we would rather sell you the right size than the bigger one.

If you are starting a prospect, take the 3 pound. If you are 90 days out and just now getting to this, take the 20 ounce and start today.

Top dress daily, by body weight

Right on his feed. No mixing, no separate step.

Start it the first day the prospect is on feed. That is not a preference, it is the finding in the trial above.

Feed it every day, straight through to the show. Combine it with the flooring and the exercise you are already managing.

On the subscription

A pig project is about five months and this is a daily product. The subscription ships it on schedule and takes 10% off. Set it up on the first order and the start date stops being something you have to remember.

Doc will make it right.

If you are not satisfied, let us know. You will not have to ship anything back.

That is the whole policy.

The craft stays yours

TrueTrac does not walk him for you and it does not train him to drive. It does not pick him out and it does not feed him.

What it does is take one variable off the table, so the pig you bring is the one your program built.

Straight answers