12 Story Idea? Contact Paul.Nolan@Farms.com Better Pork | February 2024 Dr. Huber’s Research Dr. Lee-Anne Huber’s goal for her swine research program at the University of Guelph is simple: To answer nutritionrelated questions and solve real-world challenges producers face. As an associate professor in swine nutrition, Huber sees her position as a service role to the pork industry – and her research focus has evolved to concentrate on sow nutrition. “In the broadest sense, I help producers maximize efficiency and improve margin over feed cost. Sow nutrition is an area where research is vastly outdated, especially considering the genetic progress of the last 20 years, so we can have a large positive impact,” she explains. As someone who was raised on a mixed beef and pig farm, Huber understands the value of working closely with the industry. Many of her research ideas come directly from producers and nutritionists, with whom she meets regularly – often very informally over a coffee – to talk about challenges in the barn and how her research can help. At the same time, when she has ideas of her own, she floats them past her industry contacts to gauge relevance. Huber currently has four active research streams, all with projects underway at the new Ontario Swine Research Centre in Elora, Ont. Lactating sows It was a conversation with an industry nutritionist that was the catalyst for Huber’s research into developing nutrition recommendations for lactating sows. Entering the last year of the four-year project, the team is applying precision feeding technology and exploring feed blending to precisely meet sow nutrition requirements during the transition period as well as each day of lactation. “Recommendations for lactating sows have been mostly anecdotal with no research to put some data behind those ideas,” she says. “We’re seeing some really interesting results, and we are now applying those results to see if the feeding strategy has a positive effect on sows.” Amino acids Since starting her position at Guelph, Huber has also been working on updating feeding recommendations for reproductive sows with a focus on amino acids. The last studies on the subject were done in the 1960s, she notes, and with so much genetic improvement since then, the information is no longer relevant. “We’ve done some mathematical equations to scale up requirements from the 1960s to today, but we aren’t sure if Lee-Anne Huber photo SOW NUTRITION CENTRAL TO LEE-ANNE HUBER’S WORK AT GUELPH RESEARCH SOLVES PRACTICAL SWINE INDUSTRY PROBLEMS By LILIAN SCHAER, FOR LIVESTOCK RESEARCH INNOVATION CORPORATION
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