Agriculture

Performance and longevity in your gilt herd: a nutritional point of view By: WJ Steyn, SwiNE Nutrition Management “The livestock feed industry is facing a lack of supply of vitamins A and E due to 2 recent incidents, warns the Agricultural Industries Confederation. Fefac, the European trade body for animal feed has warned that as stocks are not sufficient to offset the deficit of production, feed manufacturers globally will have no choice but to reduce the inclusion rates in the feed. (All about Feed, 2017-12-15). “Around the world, we see that demand is not being sufficiently met because of a lack of shipping availability, increased cost of available freight, and the looming Chinese holiday. (All about Feed, 2021-01-27) Background Livestock production will increasingly be affected by external factors. These include surging demands for animal products and struggling supplies of feed raw materials, resulting from the competition for natural resources [...]

GETTING THE RIGHT GILTS INTO YOUR SYSTEM By Dr Casey Bradley I am not sure about all of you, but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Christine Snowden. I really appreciate how she slows down and takes her time to select the correct gilts. Through this endeavor she has created an ideal parity hierarchy in her system while also being able to cull on sow index to make further genetic progress. In case you are unfamiliar with my background, sow longevity and gilt development has been a passion of mine ever since my first taste of large-scale swine production. I remember very clearly the amount of gilts that we had to euthanize on a weekly basis. Then having to harvest her unborn litter via a C-section because she splayed in late gestation and could not make it to the farrowing room or deliver her babies naturally. It absolutely broke my [...]