The nutrition program at Prairie Swine Centre is focused on practical approaches to meet three primary objectives; improving net income for pork producers, optimizing the use of locally available feed ingredients and in enhancing the sustainability of the pork industry. In order to improve net income for producers, feeding programs must be matched to meet overall farm objectives. Overfeeding wastes money and underfeeding impairs performance of the animals. For the past few years, research at the Prairie Swine Centre has focused on defining requirements for essential amino acids. Using a factorial approach, results from this research can be easily applied and suited to specific pork farms. A more recent focus of research has been on uniformity. Although there has been lots of discussion on uniformity, there is little knowledge of factors affecting uniformity and whether or not decisions made by producers can have any impact.
The use of local ingredients is not currently optimized by the pork industry. The main issue concerning these ingredients is variability of nutrient content. The focus of research has been on DE because with least cost ration formulation, the greatest pressure is on available energy. The objective of ingredient research is to identify chemical or physical properties related to changes in nutrient content, which can then be used to predict actual nutrient content.
To ensure that our pork industry remains environmentally sustainable, pork production must evolve with environment issues in mind. Research continues to seek to reduce nutrient excretion in slurry, reduce gas emissions into the air and minimize total water usage. One possibility of reducing total nitrogen excretions is in feeding fermentable carbohydrates, as this causes as much nitrogen as possible to be excreted in faeces rather than urine. The nutrition research program continues to focus on practical approaches for meeting the primary objectives.