Ontario Pork

 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:



Author(s): P. Purslow
Publication Date: November 2, 2007
Reference: Ontario Pork
Country: Canada

Summary:

When purchasing pork, consistency of quality is a major factor for determining if people will once again buy the product. A more consistent product can have benefits for producers as major retailers will stick with a consistent product. Many things impact meat quality such as breeding, animal production, transport, slaughter and postmortem processing. There has been lots of work done about how individual activities effect pork quality but non done that considers all factors and how they work together. This research project examines how genetics, on-farm management, packing plant management, and nutrition interact to effect pork quality. This study intends to find reasons for the variability in pork quality, and to design and test handling and nutritional strategies to improve pork quality. Measurements of meat quality found that the variation in Ontario pork was the same as tests carried out during a US study. Using statistical models researchers were able to determine that the cause of variability was from individual producer practices, kill time at the packing plant, and temperature at the plant. Some nutritional strategies devised to improve meat quality was tryptophan added to the diet to reduce stress at the time of slaughter. A low glucogenic diet had better feed efficiency than a control diet and improved meat tenderness and marbling. For handling,the researchers tested the practice of pen-walking where they walked through the pens everyday to get the pigs familiar with humans. this proved to have positive implications on water holding capacity of the pigs when slaughtered.

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