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Feed Additives

So, that basically wraps up all of the nutrients that the NRC says is required. These are all the things that a typical corn-soybean diet are not going to provide for your pigs. The protein. The energy. Minerals and vitamins. Now, we are going onto feed additives. And these are things that you put in your feed, on top of your nutrients, and that is because they usually promote growth in some fashion.

There are four main categories. First one is antimicrobial agents. Basically, antibiotics. The second one would be dewormers. The idea is these are going to get rid of parasites. You can probably pretty much guess why those are effective at helping growth. Here are some wildcards again, zinc and copper. Remember, these are minerals. We know if we stick these in super-physiological levels, that means put a bunch of it in the ration, you will end up getting more growth than if you didn’t have them there. We do not know why that works. And then the final class will be enzymes. And last week we already talked about one class, the beta glucanases that make beta glucans more available in barley.

A little bit about antibiotics because the use of antibiotics is beneficial to the industry. But, it also causes a major public relations problem to the consumer and it makes the swine industry, at least, a big target of animal-rights activists. Swine producers use them because they increase your growth rate, they increase your feed efficiency. You get more growth on less feed. So, it really impacts your bottom line. Also, they'll reduce mortality. So there is reproductive advantages. They are basically fed in three levels. The high levels would be, what I think most people would consider acceptable. Your animal is sick, so you give them antibiotics, kill off the bugs and everybody is happy. Now the low levels, they basically are what is responsible for the growth commotion. We do not understand why it works. It’s just been well documented that it works. Now the moderate levels, this is probably the biggest problem. What you are doing is you are feeding animals that have been exposed to sickness but are not sick. You’re just trying to feed them antibiotics to prevent them from becoming sick. The idea is it is kind of like a prophylactic. But the big criticism is, why are you giving them to the animals if you do not even know they are needed? The big health concern is, by just indiscriminately using antibiotics, you are going to lead to a greater increase in antibiotic drug resistance. So some of the important antibiotics we use in human health, to actually fight off infections, can theoretically become resistant to antibiotics just because of poor management. Consumer advocacy groups basically say why should our health be compromised because you do not know how to manage your animals in an environment to keep them from becoming sick? On one hand, the argument kind of stings. But, on the other hand they of have a point. Manage your animals better. Part of meat production is market-share. If the consumer perceives that the way you’re growing your animal is a detrimental practice, they might not eat as much of your product just because. Even if they do not have a good argument, although they do in this case, you have to be sensitive to their concerns.

These next couple tables are basically just numbers illustrating that antibiotics do have a positive benefit on growth.

The top table basically shows the effect on antibiotics when you put them in breeding feed.

You get about a 7% increase in the farrowing rate and you get about 0.4 more live pigs per litter. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but put yourself in Smithfield’s shoes. What is a ¼ of a pig for every litter? They have 700,000 sows. Farrow twice a year. So that is almost a pig more per sow a year. It actually translates into a lot of money.

Just reiterating a point, if you put it in farrowing and lactating feed, the pigs are actually going to survive better and their weaning weight is going to be higher.

Once again, they do not seem like high differences, but when you have a lot of pigs it adds up.

This is what I was talking about when it is a growth promotant. If you just focus in on this part of the table, we have starter, grower and finisher phases of growth.

Antibiotic can increase feed to gain ratio in a starter pig by 7%. That is the money you’re spending. And that is the money you’re theoretically going to get back out. That is going to increase by 7%. As a pig gets older, you get less of an effect. Now, we think what is happening with antibiotics are young pigs basically have passive-immunity from their mothers’ colostrum until about three weeks of age. What we think is happening is the antibiotics are kind of helping them get through the transition from the immunity given from their mother to the time they actually develop their own immunity. Another interesting thing. We talked about copper and zinc. Copper, actually, seems to have the same effect. Tt is only a little more effective. Copper represents one way the industry can actually get the same benefit and move away from antibiotics. It is pretty important. The only problem with copper is if you feed high amounts of it for a long period of time it actually becomes toxic to the animals.

Segregated, early weaning, basically, is removing the pigs from the sow at day 14. Traditionally, the industry used to wean at about 28 days. It’s kind of slowly creeped down, on average, to about three weeks. But, segregated, early weaning is an accelerated management program where the idea is you’re trying to have a compromise. You are trying to remove the pigs from the mother when they are still at the height of their immunity from their colostrum, but they have not yet been exposed to a lot of the antigens that are kind of associated with the dirt and the filth of the mother. Actually, it turns out if you wean these pigs early into an environment that is very clean, you remove the antigen challenge from the mothers, who could have two or three years of antigens collecting in their system, you will get a rapid weight gain. The drawback to this is it’s a really highly, management intense system. Plus, you are weaning them into a building that is removed quite a bit in location from where they were farrowed. Capital investment is huge. And you have to really keep the place clean. Now, in a lot of places, like North Carolina and Iowa, where the pig industry has grown to such an extent that their neighbors are basically started clamoring for laws to limit more expansion. If you want to switch to segregated early weaning, it is a problem because they have set back laws. You have to have so much space between your neighbor and a new building you want to build. You may be limited just by your neighbor. But, the idea is...Another good management can get us away from relying on antibiotics.

The final class of feed additives I would like to talk about is phytase. Now, we have already talked about phosphorus as a problem because it is chemically bound to phytate. Phosphatase is actually added because it is degrades the phytate. It is actually a bacterial enzyme that you can engineer; basically, grow in big fermentation vats. Then, you add it to the feed. It will degrade the phytate. And then it makes that phosphorus now available for the pig to actually absorb and use. The big benefit of this is you reduce the amount of phosphorus that is excreted in the manure. This alone is probably reason enough to use it. Simply because anything that you can do to that lessens your impact on the environment, lessens your neighbors hatred of what you are doing. And if you do not have neighbors yelling at you, you tend not to have Congressmen making laws that are going to impose upon the way you do things. The important thing is phytase is an important management tool to control your environmental impact. You are using nutrition and ration formulation to solve a management problem. This is taken right out of your book.

It is basically just a graphical representation of just how beneficial phytase is. The bottom is the amount of phosphorus you are feeding in the diet, and this is grams per day, that is excreted in the manure, in the feces. So you can see, if you just ignore the right half of the graph and, you just look at the growing pig. You are feeding 0.6% dietary phosphorus versus 0.4% plus phytase. You get almost a 50% reduction in the amount of phosphorus that is going to end up in the manure. So this is really dramatic. You look at just the finishing pigs, the effect is actually even a little better.

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