Farmscape for March 22, 2018
A Professor of Animal Science with Iowa State University says, as the use of antibiotics becomes more restricted, pork producers are looking much more closely at the functional properties of the ingredients that go into the diets they feed their pigs.
"Innovative Diet Formulation" will be the focus of the CFM de Lange lecture presented as part of the 2018 London Swine Conference next week.
Dr. John Patience, a Professor of Animal Science with Iowa State University, says antibiotic use in livestock production will come under tighter regulatory control later this year in Canada and it's already under tighter regulatory control in the United States.
Clip-Dr. John Patience-Iowa State University:
There are people who would like to purchase product where the animals have not been exposed to antibiotics of any kind and therefore our diets are changing because we are looking for what we call the functional properties of feeds.
Previously, when we formulated diets for pigs, we would look at the ingredients, we would look at how much energy they contain, the amino acids they contain, the vitamins and minerals they contain and we would formulate diets that would meet the requirements for the pig.
Now we go beyond that and we say, if I choose ingredient A that might make my pigs more susceptible to diarrhea and so when those pigs are young I'm not going to use ingredient A because I don't want to increase their susceptibility to diarrhea.
But I also know that ingredient B tends to help the pig combat diarrhea and therefore I ham going to use ingredient B because that's going to help the pig from a health point of view.
That's what I'm referring to when I talk about the functional properties of ingredients.
Dr. Patience says that is just starting to be an important factor and it will become a much more important factor over the next decade or two as we refine the way we formulate our diets.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork
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