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Industry Partners
Prairie Swine Centre is an affiliate of the University of Saskatchewan
Prairie Swine Centre is grateful for the assistance of the George Morris Centre in developing the economics portion of Pork Insight.
Financial support for the Enterprise Model Project and Pork Insight has been provided by:
Incorporating Manure Into a Direct Seeding System
Posted in: Environment by admin on January 1, 2003 | No Comments
The main concern, especially with large quantities of fresh solid or liquid manure, is where and when to competently dispose of it. Manure storage, handling and application don’t come without costs, can be a nuisance and can cause environmental problems. If you expect to use the manure as a crop nutrient as well you can run into even more problems. As nutrient loss in manure begins even before it is moved to the field it is hard to know how much nutrient value it actually contains. Depending on the condition of the manure, it may not contain a lot of nutrients, and tilling it into the soil may have little effect. Organic matter is the key to soil quality. Growers who use livestock manure on their fields will likely maintain and improve their soils quality beyond those who continually deplete organic matter through tilling and exporting. There are alternatives to field spreading and incorporating raw manure into the soil. Injection of liquid manure with low disturbance works and composting solid manure or feeding cattle in the field reduces handling. Direct seeding is intended to handle increased crop residue and surface organic matter, as you don’t have to till manure into the soil to reap its benefits. Another alternative is to change spreading habits to allow for less tillage.
Alberta’s new Agricultural Operation Practices Act contains specific requirements for manure management. This means that producers need a good understanding of manure composition and nutrient content and that soil testing, record keeping and application rate restrictions now apply in some cases.
Environmental Benefits of Livestock Manure Management Practices and Technology by Life Cycle Assessment
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An environmentalLife Cycle Assessment (LCA) procedure is constructed to compare the total emissions from different techniques for managing livestock wastes. Life Cycle Assessment is a method of holistically and systematically accounting for the environmental benefits and burdens of the production of goods and services including consequential burdens generated elsewhere. As waste emissions are very variable, the methodology is extended to include the uncertainty in the estimates in order to indicate the significance of differences between techniques. The object is to inform policy of whether options are better for the environment by quantifying potentialemissions abatement, by highlighting priority environmentalimpac ts and by revealing compromises for further investigation.
This paper reports comparative LCAs for severalpig waste management options. For example, various
slurry application techniques, including: splash plates, band spreaders and injection. If the splash-plate system is taken as a reference, the injector system causes only 64% of the environmental acidification and 71% of the eutrophication of surface waters. The benefits must be offset against the increase in nitrate leaching of 50%. In contrast, the band spreader system offers 28% of the benefits of injection. The environmentalimpac ts have also been expressed as a proportion of the UK nationalemissions . This gives each impact a weighted-value that enables direct comparisons of disparate impacts. Although band spreader systems showed an aggregated, or total, environmental impact reduction of almost 10%, the reduction is not significant when uncertainty is taken into account. Using an anaerobic digester shows few overall benefits due to the fugitive losses of methane. However, if these can be eliminated the global warming potential from waste management is reduced close to zero.
Born in Canada and Raised in the USA
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Premium Pork is a farrow to finish system with over 40,000 sows in Canada that finishes all of its commercial hogs in the United States. Reasons for doing this includes cheap feed for finishing hogs in the USA, better packer-producer relationships in the USA, low health status due to low pig density in Canada, decline of the Canadian dollar, and country of origin labeling. Premium Pork has built partners with local farmers, partners with packers, uses Genetiporc genetics (Quebec genetics company), has American grow-finish partners, treats employees well, and has a relationship with several Canadian nutrition companies. Using tight biosecurity regulations, good food safety procedures (such as HACCP), environmentally sound and quality production practices, Premium Pork has grown into the second largest sow herd in Canada.
Effect of social group size on aggressive behaviour of grower-finisher pigs in fully slatted-floor rearing system
Posted in: Prairie Swine Centre by admin on | No Comments
The impact of large group size on social behaviour of pigs is poorly understood. A study was conducted to assess the social aggression of grower-finisher pigs in large groups. Pigs with large social group experience displayed behaviour compared to those living in small social groups.
Group Housing: Alternative Systems, Alternative Management
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The type of group housing for sows should be selected based on the overall target of the herd. Three options exist for feed control: average feed intake for all sows, equal intake for all individuals, and different amounts to different animals. Floor feeding, the most basic form of group housing, has issues with aggression and can only really see an appropriate average intake. These problems can be reduced (but not eliminated) by increasing space allowance and putting skinny sows into separate groups. A trickle system can provide a relatively even distribution of feed. Sows enter small individual stalls while feed is trickled down at an appropriate rate. Individual confinement is the only way to control individual feed intake. This is possible with stalls that lock the sow in and electronically controlled gates to allow different groups access to the feeding stalls at different times of the day. Electronic sow feeders are an alternative that electronically monitors how much a sow eats in a feeding area. This amount is reset daily, which allows for a daily allotment of feed for each sow. Social management of sows considers frequency of regrouping, sorting, and group size. A static group of sows are grouped once and only once during gestation while a dynamic group adds new animals on several occasions. Dynamic grouping could be detrimental to the sows welfare and productivity. One of the main benefits of group housing is the ability of the sow to manage its own comfort. Fairly rapid estrus detection can be achieved by bringing a boar to a pen adjacent to the group for a short period each day. If several animals need breeding they can be penned in stalls for a short time. Research done at the Prairie Swine Centre show that there was only a 2% difference in productivity between a static group, dynamic group, and conventional gestation stalls.
Nursery Management: Hygiene and Feeding Management Practices to Ensure Healthy Pigs
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Intestinal diseases are still a problem with nursery-aged pigs. Good hygiene practices are essential for minimizing disease, and this includes running all-in-all-out and washing/sanitization. Barns should be built with materials that are easy to clean. This involves smooth surfaces because of the fact that more infectious organic matter can be lodged in crevices in rough surfaced materials. Dampening the room before high-powered washing can sustain the fecal matter and make removal easier. Proper disinfection should follow immediately after washing to help minimize such diseases as PCV2. Dipping in boot baths along is not suffice; boots need to be scrubbed and cleaned prior to disinfecting in the boot bath.
Three basic rules for a nursery pigs nutritional program include: 1) Start with as heavy a pig as possible. Due to the industry weaning early, the heavier and older pigs tend to grow faster and do better health-wise. 2) Feed as simple diets as possible. This includes lowest-cost feed (to an extent), which can include soybean and grains. The pigs energy feed intake must be maximized (by use of ingredients such as fats) and we make sure that the ingredients used are digestible by the piglets. Supplementing nursery diets with 3000 ppm Zinc Oxide post-weaning has also been observed to have beneficial effects in helping control post-weaning E. coli infections. 3) Focus on nursery feeding management. Adding fiber or restricting feed intake are not viable options for controlling intestinal disease. Feeders need to be adjusted properly as to not allow too much or too little, both of which cases can increase the chance of intestinal disease. Approximately 25 to 50% of the feeding pan should be visible in the first few days after weaning.
Cattle discriminate between individual familiar herd members ion a learning experiment
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This study was conducted to determine if cattle could discriminate between two familiar herdmates. The ability to discriminate is necessary for animals to form affiliative relationships (friendships) with other cattle in their herd. It is also helpful, although perhaps not essential, for the formation of stable social structures or hierarchies within the herd. Six heifers were used and trained to distinguish between two herdmates in a Y-maze. Approaching one herdmates resulted in a reward, while approaching the other did not. All of the cattle quickly learned which animal was linked to the reward, indicating that some form of discrimination occurred. When animals were given a second task, of learning the discriminate between two additional herdmates, they were slower to learn the task. There appeared to be some carryover effect that caused confusion in the animals. This is a fairly basic study examining the basis for social behaviour in herds of cattle, but nonetheless produced some unexpected results in that the second test took longer than the first.