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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:
Bugs, Drugs and You
Posted in: Production by admin on January 1, 2003 | No Comments
The concern with antibiotics is that the organism the drug is supposed to kill may develop a resistance to the drug and make it more difficult or maybe impossible to treat. This resistant disease can then be spread to others. Some microbes can even transfer from animal to man (called zoonosis). In Canada and elsewhere, we use antimicrobial drugs to treat sick animals, prevent disease, and to enhance production. This contributes to safe and wholesome food from healthy animals, reducing human exposure to pathogens, promoting health and well being of animals, and reducing the cost of food production. The increase in demand for food animal products will result in an increased demand for animal health management tools (including antimicrobials). The Veterinary Drugs Directorate is beginning to look past the chemical residues in meat to include microbial safety. Some needs include a coordinated surveillance system for antimicrobial resistance in the major pathogens affecting food animals, regulation of antimicrobials to consider the human health impacts of resistance, and to assess federal and provincial jurisdiction regarding the sale and use of antimicrobials in animals. An on farm food safety program should be designed to address antimicrobial issues. The Animal Nutrition Association of Canada has developed a HACCP based program that has audit controls for its members, commercial feed manufacturers. The CFIA is in the process of establishing a mandatory HACCP-based regulation for the manufacture of medicated feed on farm and in commercial mills.
THE PIG FARM MANAGER FOR MODELLING PIG PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
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Everything Old Is New Again – Sow Housing
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Danish pig production has increased considerably since Denmark became a member of the European Community in 1972. As of 2000 about 85% was exported to over 100 countries. Recently the European Union made group-housing systems for gestating sows mandatory. The Danish act on sow housing includes group housing from four weeks after service until seven days before farrowing, specific space requirements, solid floors, and a cooling system. Simple group housing systems are relatively cheap but offer little control over sows feed intake, lower the live born pigs, and some sows lose body condition and must be removed. Electric sow feeding systems (ESF) allow sows to be individually fed while residing in groups. Early trials churned out negative results, some including increased risk of abortion, loss of embryos, and higher mastitis incidence in gilts. A high transition period plagued the industry with a 1 to 1.5 year adjustment of herd and management to group housing (which can lead to reduced productivity and an increased cull rate). The Danish Applied Pig Research Scheme (DAPR) developed a set of recommendations for ESF: pen design should have a separate eating and dunging area, lying area should accommodate all sows comfortably, straw must be provided in the lying area, must have 1.1 to 1.3 m2 per sow, and more. They all help to minimize productivity loss when adapting to the ESF. Free access stalls are low tech and becoming popular. They are more expensive because one stall is required for each individual but it provides individual control over feed intake.
Estimating Genetic Merit
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In estimating the genetic merit of an animal, breeders are trying to determine the animal’s value as a parent, its breeding value. The phenotype of an animal (the traits we see and measure) is a combination of genetic and environmental effects. Genetic effects are the result of the genes inherited from parents. Environmental effects are the result of conditions the animal experienced, such as level of nutrition, stocking density, temperature, or health status.
The challenge to the breeder is to determine how much of an animal’s superiority (or inferiority) for a trait is due to additive genetic effects, since this is what will be passed on to its progeny through its own genes. Defining what constitutes genetic merit is an important first step in this process. This will be discussed further in NSIF-FS9, “Multiple Trait Selection for Pork Improvement,” but genetic merit can be defined as how an animal ranks, relative to other selection candidates, for its ability to produce superior offspring.
Favorable performance for a characteristic is an obvious way to rank animals; however, it should be done relative to other animals that are of similar age and housed and raised under similar conditions. It is best to compare an animal’s performance record to the average of the group of animals that they were raised with. This can be done by calculating performance deviations from the group average or the ratio of animal’s performance with the group average. For example, a gilt has an average daily gain of 1.9 lb/day for the grow-finish period while the other gilts of similar age and raised in the same building averaged 1.8 lb/day for average daily gain. The gilt in question would have a performance deviation of 0.1 lb/day, which is favorable and a ratio of 105.6 (1.9/1.8). This is the first step in evaluating an animal’s genetic merit for performance characteristics. For further examples see Table 1.
Two terms are often used in discussing genetic merit. The first term, Estimated Breeding Value (EBV) is the estimated genetic merit of animal, expressed as a deviation. The second term, Expected Progeny Difference (EPD) is one-half an animal’s Estimated Breeding Value and can be used to determine the expected performance change of progeny if the animal in question is used as a parent. Methods to estimate genetic merit in swine have evolved considerably this century. As breeders have been able to incorporate increasing amounts of information to assess an animal’s breeding value, methods have grown from simple visual appraisal to complex statistical techniques. The purpose of this fact sheet is to discuss these alternative methods.
Structure of the Global Markets for Meat
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