Farmscape for July 14, 2011   (Episode 3623)

Practical advice to help pork producers improve productivity and increase profits is the focus of the Prairie Swine Centre's just released 2010 annual report.

The Prairie Swine Centre's 2010 annual report, released this week, includes 14 scientific articles and updates on activities in the centre's pig production unit and in technology transfer for 2010.

Centre president and CEO Lee Whittington notes the report encapsulates research conducted during 2010 in the areas of nutrition, engineering, animal behavior and management.

Clip-Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre:
Certainly with nutrition, quite simple, 65 percent of the cost of production is feed and so there's always opportunities to improve productivity and cost of production by doing research in feed ingredients and in dietary requirements.

With engineering the challenge has always been how to optimize the space in which the pig is and so we do a lot of work for instance in utility costs and how to drive those down.

Then when it comes to behavior, that's really one of our unique characteristics at the swine centre in that we look at the practical questions around sow housing number of pigs per pen, when new technology comes out like auto-sorters for grow finish, that's the kind of work that we do where we try to understand the pigs' behavior, the pigs' motivation and see how we can capitalize on that in a commercial production systems.

In this case, the 2010 report, it actually has 14 different projects that are being reported in there and they range all the way from using something quite novel like nanoparticles to reduce hydrogen sulfide in manure slurry right through to how many peas can we put in an animal's diet and is there any feed refusal and what's it do to our cost of production.

For more information on research conducted at the prairie swine centre visit prairieswine.com.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       * Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council