Farmscape for May 1, 2018

Research conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc shows acidification and fermentation can help improve the nutrient value of low quality feed grains.
In Partnership with Swine Innovation Porc, scientists with the University of Saskatchewan are evaluating the benefits fermentation and acidification to improve the value of low quality feeds.
"Feed Processing for Improved Production" was discussed last week as part of the Prairie Swine Centre's 2018 Spring Producer Meetings.
Dr. Denise Beaulieu, an Assistant Professor Monogastric Nutrition with the University of Saskatchewan, explains the intent of the work was to identify processing options, especially for high moisture grain.

Clip-Dr. Denise Beaulieu-University of Saskatchewan:
As pork producers we're always looking at ways to improve our bottom line.
One way of doing that is to use low quality ingredients and then we can feed these to the pig and produce good protein.
That's also, in my opinion, a really good way of improving sustainability of pork production and protein production is to use low quality grains.
We're not competing with humans for these grains and it's a really good way of making use and recycling low quality grains to the pig.
However very often these are lower in digestible nutrients so we have to do something with them to improve nutrient digestibility of these feeds.
We were looking specifically at fermentation.
Fermentation is adding bacteria, in this case a couple of different strains of lactobacilli, and so fermentation.
Those bacteria produce enzymes and the enzymes break down the feed into organic acids.
That allows the feed to be preserved.
We were also looking directly at adding acids to the feed so here again lowering the pH, decrease the bacterial growth to preserve the grain and then the pig also gets some the benefit from that reduced pH.

Dr. Beaulieu says that low pH helps with digestion, it activates enzymes required for digestion and some organic acids provide additional benefits such as stimulating growth of the gut wall.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork