Now available - a one-stop compendium of information on swine nutrition

Monday, August 9, 2010

The new National Swine Nutrition Guide offers an answer to all you need to know about science-based feeding and nutrition

by JANICE MURPHY

Are you tired of "googling" information on feeding pigs? Have you been wishing for a one-stop shop for solutions to troubling trough questions? Well, your prayers may have been answered.   

The National Swine Nutrition Guide was recently released and is touted as an education and extension effort aimed at providing science-based feeding and nutrition information to the pork industry. Although this is a U.S. resource, Canadian pork producers can certainly benefit from this initiative.

This swine nutrition Bible is the result of a partnership between the U.S. Pork Center of Excellence, United Soybean Board and several land-grant universities, including the pork powerhouses of Purdue, Kansas State, Nebraska, Illinois, North Carolina State, Minnesota and Iowa State.

A two-year funding commitment from the United Soybean Board allowed a committee, made up of the veritable disciples of swine nutrition, to develop the information along with feed formulation software, training materials to educate producers on the use of the guide, and a series of regional conferences to be held throughout the United States this year.

Up until now, many universities published their own applied swine feeding recommendations. Relying on a wide array of resources – the Nutrient Requirements of Swine (NRC, 1998), research results and their own personal experience – swine extension and research faculty developed specific feeding guidelines for use within their own state or region. In light of the contraction of our modern pork industry, with fewer swine faculty at many institutions and the creation of the U.S. Pork Center of Excellence, a collaborative effort on this type of an initiative made sense.

Established in 2005, the U.S. Pork Center of Excellence is a partnership that brings together academic expertise in pork production research, teaching and extension.

Housed at the National Swine Research and Information Center at Iowa State University, the coalition draws its members from two branches of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Pork Board and the National Pork Producers Council, as well as 17 state pork producer associations and 24 land-grant universities.

Swine nutrition and feeding management is a complex process requiring the consideration of a myriad of factors, such as feed intake, gender, genotype and productivity, stage of production, health, feed additives, feed ingredient quality, feed processing, alternate feedstuffs, nutrient bioavailability, nutrient interactions, government regulations, manure management, safety margins and water. An understanding of swine nutrition is vital to any production system. Feed represents the single largest cost of producing pork, historically accounting for approximately 60 per cent of all costs in farrow-to-finish operations.

The aim of the National Swine Nutrition Guide is to enhance the understanding of basic nutrition, feeding principles and related management practices and to serve as a reference for the whole industry, whether they are pork producers, students, educators or industry stakeholders. In these turbulent economic times, these tools are essential to maintaining profitability.

Available from Iowa State University at a cost of US$125, the guide includes 35 swine nutrition fact sheets. Each factsheet was written by swine experts and reviewed by industry stakeholders to provide comprehensive coverage of the topic. In contrast to most publications of this kind, this guide is also available on the Internet, where each chapter can be downloaded free in pdf format. All of the information is featured on the U.S. Pork Center of Excellence website at http://www.usporkcenter.org/.

More than 30 fact sheets included in this new guide cover topics including: protein and energy sources, trace and macro minerals, water, additives, co-products, and a variety of diets for different categories of swine.

The guide also includes a booklet with nutrient recommendation tables, as well as diet formulation and evaluation software. This software, which has MS Excel as an interface, can be used to perform two distinct functions – formulating swine diets on a least-cost basis or evaluating the nutritional adequacy of existing diets. These functions can be used to perform dietary assessments for the whole herd, whether for sows, breeding boars, nursery pigs, grower-finisher pigs, replacement gilts and boars.

Users of the guide are reminded that there are many different drivers for diet formulations that change from one producer to another. Obviously, economics are a major factor, but there are others such as marketing, health status, ingredient pricing and availability, marketing contracts, packer grids and pig flow that must also be taken into account. The effects of these drivers must be analyzed carefully and taken into consideration in order to arrive at the optimum diet formulation for a particular production system.

In the end, it is important to keep in mind that the National Swine Nutrition Guide and associated material is intended to be just that, a guide. Much like the Bible itself, it cannot provide the definitive answer to each and every feeding challenge faced by pork producers in their day-to-day activities. BP

Janice Murphy is a former Ontario agriculture ministry swine nutritionist who now lives and works in Prince Edward Island.