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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:
Identifying the true value of effective replacement gilt
Posted in: Production by admin on January 1, 2004 | No Comments
Sow replacement rate is very high in many farms, which leads to an increase in need for replacement gilts. Therefore it should be a goal to improve gilt management to increase breeding herd productivity and reduce the amount of replacements needed. Time should be put into improving current gilt programs. With good management of gilt replacement, it is possible to improve labor efficiency and space usage. Three keys to good gilt replacement are: 1) Effective selection program to identify 75 to 80% of the most fertile animals; 2) Achieving adequate body condition at first mating; and 3) Minimizing non-productive days.
Selection should include 3 stages. Stage 1 should be implemented when the gilts leave the nursery. Here gilts can be checked for growth rate and 12 to 14 teats. Stage 2 should entail weight, growth rate, and back fat depth. Here, they MUST have a growth rate of 0.6 kg/day, teats should be rechecked, and hernias or ruptures should be checked for. Stage 3 should be the beginning of puberty induction. This helps to reduce the amount of days until puberty (reduce non-productive days).
Early puberty induction allows the identification of prolific gilts. Non-select gilts are gilts that do not show sexual maturity at 180 days of age. They will have poorer reproductive performance throughout their life. Proper stimulation via boar helps to identify those 75 to 80% of gilts mentioned earlier. It is suggested that puberty induction begin at 160 days of age until first estrus OR until 190 days of age. The weight target at first breeding is 135 to 150 kg. This ensures that gilts have proper body conditioning in order to lead a quality reproductive life, as well as reduce non-productive days.
Warming up for C.O.O.L.: Canadian Response
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Country of Origin Labelling (COOL) has been a household name in the food sector for roughly two years and is basically now law. As of October 2004 (in the USA anyways), COOL is mandatory (law), implementation was about 2 billion USD, industry stakeholders had their input heard, and more concerning the passage of COOL into law. Reasons for supporting COOL include the fact that people have a right to know where their food came from and may pay a premium for meat of a different origin. This theory is flawed, and many think that politicians that have no real understanding of agriculture and economics passed COOL into law. In conclusion, COOL is a shortsighted attempt by anti-trade members in the US to construct a complex and costly trade barrier to trade in livestock and red meat. There is little economic merit other than consumer rights, even though consumers indicate they have no interest in the origin. The poultry industry is excluded from this, which helps it due to the fact that the costs of COOL would be highest for pork and beef.
Feeding High-Fat Oats to Swine
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The performance of pigs fed diets based on oat is typically poorer than that of pigs fed diets based on higher energy cereal grains. The reason for this is that oat provides approximately 10% less digestible energy than barley and about 20% less digestible energy than wheat and corn due to its high fibre content. The fibre itself is not digestible and its presence also impairs the digestibility of energy and other nutrients contained in the grain. Current recommendations regarding the incorporation of oat into rations fed to growing-finishing swine suggest that their inclusion should be limited to less than 20%. However, these recommendations are based largely on experiments conducted in excess of 25 years ago. Considerable improvement has been made in oat varieties during this period, especially in terms of lower % hull. The results of the present experiment indicate that both normal and high fat oats can substitute for barley at levels as high as 50% of the diet without hindering pig performance. A breeding project was recently undertaken at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre to develop a high-fat oat for use in livestock feeding. Feeding this recently developed high-fat oat to pigs improved growth rate and efficiency of feed conversion when compared with normal-fat oat. Nutrient digestibility also improved with no negative effects on carcass quality. These results provide a strong indication that high-fat oat is superior to normal-fat oat as an energy source for swine. There appears to be greater potential to utilize oat, regardless of fat level, in rations fed to growing-finishing pigs than is currently being achieved. The agronomic properties of high-fat oat are still being tested at the Crop Development Centre and they are not currently available for commercial feeding. However, in the future, high-fat oats may provide swine producers with an alternative energy source that can be successfully incorporated into rations fed to swine.
Growth performance of pigs fed hand-chopped sugar cane stalks
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Dealing with Water Concerns for Pork Production
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Water is an important factor in swine production for performance of vital bodily functions; therefore it needs to be managed well. As pigs progress throughout the different stages of production and different developments are desired, their water requirement will change. Regardless of the stage of production, water should be available to all pigs ad libitum. Areas of specific water concern include: 1) Water quality (mainly the chemical composition and bacteria load which can have detrimental effects to pigs health); 2) Diet composition (dry matter content and concentrations of salt,
crude protein and fibre levels are known to influence water intake in pigs); 3) Physiology (e.g. – gestation vs. lactation); 4) Environmental factors (such as heat stresses); and 5) Equipment design and placement (such as water nipple availability and placement).
To deal with water quality concerns, water quality should be tested at least once a year for coliform contamination and mineral concentration so that diets can be adjusted accordingly. Several treatments are available including chlorination, acidification, softening, and coagulation. Although these do provide an effective treatment, it should not permanently substitute getting to the root of the problem.
Prenatal Programming of Postnatal Performance – the Unseen Cause of Variance
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In the context of the present session, we intend to summarize existing literature that indicates that the variation in growth performance after birth may be largely determined, and essentially pre-programmed, during fetal development in the uterus. Furthermore, it is likely that these pre-programmed limitations in growth performance will only finally express themselves in the late grower / early finisher stage of production. We will also present preliminary evidence that differences in fetal development that will likely affect postnatal growth performance can even be present without associated effects in birth weight. Thus sorting pigs by weight at the nursery and grower stages will not resolve the variation in growth performance that is still an inherent characteristic of particular pigs or litters. Thus we face the conundrum that 13 pigs born in two different litters, with the same average birthweight, may originate from litters with very different numbers of surviving embryos around day 30 of gestation, and this will pre-program these two litters to have very different postnatal growth potential.
Antibiotic in swine diets: alternatives – probiotics? Part III
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The term probiotics has been defined “living microorganisms, which upon ingestion in certain numbers exert health benefits beyond inherent general nutrition. The original idea with probiotics was to change the composition of the normal intestinal microflora from a potentially harmful composition to a microflora that would be beneficial for the host. In order to function as probiotics, bacteria first must pass through the stomach and survive its low pH and then proceed to the small intestine and tolerate the bile salt present. Finally, it is believed that the bacteria need to adhere to mucosal surfaces. Previously, we discussed the consequences of withdrawal of antibiotics from swine diets and looked carefully at Danish data where this has been done systematically and the consequences documented. From those studies, we could see that antibiotics could indeed be withdrawn from the diets of ALL animals in the production cycle, but when things went wrong the consequences were significant and there was a surge of therapeutic antibiotic usage to suppress the disease situation. The most significant problem is the weanling pig. In order to keep the disease situation suppressed, the management system known as segregated early weaning or medicated early weaning was rapidly established. However, this management system only reduces the likelihood of exposure to pathogenic bacteria and interferes with the establishment of normal protective bacterial flora. This lack of protective bacterial flora has caused an emergence of “new” disease problems in post-weaned pigs such as E. coli diarrhea, edema disease, Glasser’s disease, streptococcal meningitis and Salmonellosis. A study in China on 50-day-old weaned piglets showed that a low dose of probiotics could increase liveweight, reduce diarrhea and lower ammonia odours, so there is good evidence to show that probiotics are effective, however, future issues will address prebiotics, other types of supplements, specialized nutrition and management.