we conclude that in a farm with a proper vaccination schedule and low clinical incidence of diseases, farmers will obtain no production benefits from cross-fostering low–birth weight piglets to create litters with similar birth weights and that the best management strategy should be to fix litters by the number of piglets (considering the number of a sow’s functioning teats) and to limit efforts to orally supplement low–birth weight piglets with colostrum during the first hours of life. However, these conclusions could be different for commercial farms with lower or different sanitary conditions.