PIC's new pig digs

Pig Improvement Corporation, the world's biggest pig breeder, has opened a new office and transportation complex just south of Mitchell.

Active in 30 countries, PIC began in the early 1960s in England, said new PIC Canada general manager Fred Hays at the recent opening of the Mitchell facility. The first PIC Canadian franchise dates back to 1970, started by Acme, Alberta-based Dave Price, who expanded into the U.S., and eventually sold the business to PIC International last year. Price continues as a multiplier of PIC breeding stock.

Adding to a worldwide nucleus herd of 23,300 sows and 22 genetic lines, PIC Canada is building $25-million facilities in Kipling, Sask., to accommodate a 2,500-sow nucleus herd. Offspring will be distributed to Canada and the U.S. Officials said PIC will continue to invest in Canada. Worldwide, PIC International employs 10,500, including 13 veterinarians and 22 scientists and has a $5.5-million research budget.

Also under construction is a molecular and embryology laboratory in Berkeley, Ca., which will be used for Marker Assisted Selection (MAS), a process that allows breeders to select genetics pre-weaning. Tails from prospective breeding animals are docked shortly after birth, bagged, frozen and then examined for desired genes.

MAS both helps select against harmful genes, and helps estimate an animal's breeding value. PIC currently uses five marker tests - two for litter size, two for meat quality and one for coat colour. As well as MAS, PIC's "quantitative genetics" have improved growth rate, feed efficiency and carcass lean by one to two per cent a year, said officials. Over the past decade, enhanced computer technology has improved selection for low heritable traits such as litter size.

Andrew Coates, PIC market development manager, said PIC Canada's objective will be "breeding for meat quality." The pork chain begins at breeding and ends with an estimate of pork value to the consumer, Coates said. Along the chain are many variables affecting the profitability for the producer, packer, processor and others, he said. - Andy Bunn

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.



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Packer picket Midnight Dec. 6 over 800 United Food and Commercial Workers International Union workers at Quality Meats' two plants in Toronto and Bramalea, which had been processing 23,000 hogs a week, went on strike over wage cuts. About 450 pork producers from Perth and Huron counties met in Mitchell last month and voted unanimously in favour of the provincial government legislating the workers back, though one producer warned of the dangers of pork processed by disgruntled workers, and Ontario Pork head Paul Knechtel urged producers to proceed with caution on the issue of legislation. - Christina Selby © copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited. back

Signs of the times

Have you noticed the catchy new signs on the tractor trailers hauling Ontario market hogs these days? They feature slogans such as, "Every day is Earth Day on our farm," and "If you ate today, thank a farmer."

"The idea is to heighten awareness of the good job farmers are doing. A lot of non-farmers don't recognize the value of agriculture in society," notes Ontario Pork communications director Keith Robbins.

The 2 x 3-foot signs are part of a three-month pilot project involving 25 trucks owned by O'Rourke Transport, Luckhart Transport, Doug Adams Transport and Bob Fulsom Transport.

The project will be expanded to the more than 300 trucks hauling pigs sold through the pork board if feedback is positive, Robbins says.

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All the poop on 200-bushel corn

Lambton producer Alfred Feddes hit 200 bushels of corn an acre in
'98,
with no commercial fertilizer - or complaints from neighbours

By John Muggeridge

When you use a vacuum to suck manure and your neighbour uses one to suck leaves, you have to be careful when you spread.

With a little bit of common courtesy and common sense, however, Lambton county pork producer Alfred Feddes has managed to do what his counterparts in odour hotspots in neighbouring Kent and Huron counties haven't: Spread - and even irrigate - manure without offending the sensitive non-farming nostrils in $400,000 waterfront homes that border his farm. He's getting 200-acre corn to boot.

"He's got a shovel for his manure, and [the neighbours] have blowers to suck up their driveway," quips Alfred's wife Luanne, who helps look after their four children, aged 5-12, and run the family 100-acre 85-sow farrow-to-finish business overlooking the St. Clair River in Port Lambton.

It's a contrast the Feddes, who have farmed along the scenic Bluewater Highway skirting the St. Clair since 1962, have learned to live with, as urban professionals' large estate homes, with manicured lawns and spotless drives, have mushroomed over the past 15 years.

To keep down smell, manure is injected with Alfred's "old battleaxe," a 3150-gallon two-decade-old Better Bilt vacuum spreader with two injectors mounted on the front. Any manure spread above ground is incorporated immediately. Manure is even irrigated - normally viewed as an invitation for irate phone calls - in the spring, but Alfred keeps a careful watch on wind speed and direction, and has yet to get a complaint about odour.

Nor has he any complaints about 1998 corn yield, which averaged close to 200 bushels an acre with no commercial fertilizer.

The producer puts part of the credit to "the most beautiful ground in Sombra township," and to Mother Nature, who bathed his 3150-CHU Pioneer hybrid in 3400 to 3500 heat units, and "perfect, perfect, perfect timely rains."

But nutrient management plays a large role on the Feddes' farm as well. "I like to think of the whole farm as a circle, where one feeds off the other," Feddes says. Manure feeds corn which feeds pigs which produce manure which feeds corn. Even purchased nutrients from Kenpal Farm Products in Centralia is "fertilizer...in the form of premix," Alfred quips. Mixed with a home-built hydraulic stirrer in the farm's 30x30-foot 120,000-gallon storage, manure is irrigated in the spring on corn land at 3,000 gallons an acre with an LH hard hose system. About 2,000 gallons an acre are injected before winter wheat. Throughout the summer, up to 3,000 gallons are injected into wheat ground.

Soybeans, which are no-tilled, get no fertilizer - Feddes says manure application on rich ground will cause beans to lodge, increasing white mould risk.

Wheat is normally the only crop to get commercial fertilizer - a spring starter of 50 to 70 pounds of nitrogen. Any corn land missed with manure got 100 pounds of urea.

But the other two pieces to the puzzle are crop rotation and clover, which Feddes underseeds at 10 pounds an acre in wheat in March off the ATV.

Feddes says a good clover crop is worth up to 100 pounds of N over several years. With manure and the wheat-clover plowdown, soil in the spring "just falls apart like a garden," says Feddes. "It's just in beautiful condition, and if you add some manure to it, it's just unbelievable."

Irrigation is an efficient way of applying manure - setup takes one hour, the spread is "almost perfect," and it's down in eight hours.

Unlike injection, however, which Feddes says he can do "beside the house and you won't smell anything," odour from irrigation can carry.

Last spring, Feddes waited two weeks for the wind to change to the southwest and calm down, before planting the last half of his corn crop. As luck would have it, the later-planted crop yielded the best. "I don't want to spread manure if the wind's wrong," he says. "If people see that gun going in the field and they can't smell it - no problem....It's the smell that ticks people off."

Feddes doesn't pretend his manure methods don't need some fine-tuning. While 200-bushel corn is a huge fertility draw on the soil, he admits gauging exactly what nutrients are being applied is still an imprecise science.

By OMAFRA recommendations, Feddes figures he's applying 10 to 15 pounds an acre of nitrogen per 1,000 gallons of slurry, for a total 100 pounds over the year - plus the residual effects of the clover. Soil tests after wheat harvest every four years indicate nutrient levels are "up there, but...not excessively high."

He hopes to get a better idea of his fertility picture by having the local elevator grid map his fields this year. He's also looking at feeding a phytase-based premix, which reduces phosphorus excretion by up to 25 per cent. "It's part of being a good steward - not just as far as the land goes, but as far as your neighbours go."

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No-frills farm, but it works

When you run an 85-sow farrow-to-finish business and specialty crop land around you sells for $8,000 an acre, you work with what you've got. "There's no way I could buy land at those values," says Lambton county pork producer Alfred Feddes, who has made a no-frills system based on 100 acres produce some decent numbers.

Feddes jokes that his newest tractor is a 1982, his manure spreader is 20 years old, and he still floor feeds, even though that's "like a swear word to all modern farmers." He hires custom for combining and no-till soybean planting. Corn still goes in 38-inch rows.

Feddes, a 3-P member whose pigs go to Maple Leaf in Burlington now that Thorn Apple has closed, weans between 9.2 and 9.5 pigs per sow at 2.3 turns a year. Pigs leave the barn at an average 249 pounds in 170-180 days. Breeding stock is raised on the farm.

An innovation in the dry sow barn enhances both efficient use of space and sow comfort: turnaround dry sow stalls, which have swinging side rails allowing sows to turn around. The stalls can also be butted up against the wall, eliminating the need for a two-foot alley.

As for floor feeding, Feddes is convinced it reduces wastage and keeps pigs dunging in one area. A slatted barn would change the equation, however, he says.

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.



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Manure, nature's fungicide

Ag Canada researcher says manure kills soil bacterial disease

BY ROBERT IRWIN

It's all in the eye of the beholder. Many see manure as an environmental threat and wish it would go away.

Dr. George Lazarovits, an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research scientist who heads a London-based 17-member team, has focused on using manure to reduce pesticide use, and insists that it holds the key to reducing pests and diseases that damage crops.

Lazarovits acknowledges the need to limit nitrate application but says more manure is better for many crops. Judicious use, he maintains, would reduce the use in some crops of harmful pesticides such as methyl bromide.

A key stumbling block is funding. Chemical companies think nothing of spending $100,000 million to bring a new pesticide to market "but if I wanted to bring a swine manure time protectant to market I'd be lucky to get $100,000," Lazarovits complains.

"Every time you put on [commercial] fertilizer you burn off some carbon and you do this for 25 years and you end up with very little organic matter.

"This is an old concept but one which we feel we can throw new technologies at," explains Lazarovits. He says one problem with traditional research has been a focus on waste management instead of its usefulness. Adding nutrients in organic forms such as manure creates soil that provides energy for plants as well as essential nutrients.

This produces plants which are healthier and therefore better equipped to withstand attack from diseases and pests. In California, growers who have depleted organic material pay $2,000 per acre for "invasive treatments, like methyl bromide," a controversial fumigant, Lazarovits says.

In Ontario, potato growers who frequently use 1,000 pounds of commercial fertilizer per acre have most to gain, Lazarovits says.

Nematodes, fungi, and bacterial diseases are the targets. With financial support from the Ontario Potato Growers' Marketing Board, Lazarovits has tackled fields where organic content is less than one per cent. Manure has been as good "as anything that is on the market," for controlling bacterial diseases and fungi, he concludes.

Blights such as potato scab, verticillium wilt and early dying complex have all responded. There has also been a "significant reduction" in pathogenic nematodes.

"The anomaly is that while you are reducing the parasitic organisms you increase the rest of the microbial community. This is generally a positive outcome because as the organisms die off over time soil carbon levels rise."

There's more to organic disease control than just spreading manure, Lazarovits says: "We're finding that these manures are soil-specific. They work well in one soil and they don't do anything in another."

In earlier work carried out under the government's Green Plan, Lazarovits and his team discovered manure cured diseases on three fields but failed completely on a fourth. They also found liquid swine manure worked well on one test when applied to dry soil but failed when soil was wet.

The same study found liquid swine manure and chicken manure each worked well in one test, while solid cow manure and aerobically-treated chicken manure provided no benefit. One challenge for researchers is to find ways to match manure with the soil where it will be beneficial.

Until his work began, many Ontario potato growers avoided manure because of fears it would trigger diseases. While their outlook has changed, Lazarovits says the only way to ensure positive results is to match manure carefully with soil requirements.

Lazarovits believes the trend toward larger farms and manure volumes will drive producers to rethink the cost accounting they've done. A pig probably eats better than we do and then we throw half of that in the tank.

He is seeking $300,000 to continue the research begun under the former Green Plan. Ontario Pork has pledged $50,000 and support is expected from Manitoba and Alberta as well.

Funds committed to date, along with AAFC matching funds, will allow a relatively small one and a half person-year project to proceed this year. Lazarovits hopes eventually to raise enough to allow for a four- or five-person project.

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.



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Euro hog housing

Farm & Country PORK European correspondent Norman Dunn looks at pig housing developments throughout Northern Europe

Waterbeds for pigs

Waterbeds for piglets boost survival and overall performance, according to international flooring expert MIK, which launched them at EuroTier, Europe's largest livestock fair held November in Germany.

The young pigs' luxury pads come in four sizes - rectangular 60 x 115 cm and 45 x 158 cm; and trapezoid for placing in the right- or left-hand pen corners, 50 x 75 x 75 x 115 cm. In each case, heated lying area is 0.71 square metre. Optimum bed surface temperature is 35C.

The secret of the waterbed, say MIK engineers, is the even distribution of warmth and comfort, with room for the whole litter.

The interwoven, bite-resistant, nylon- skinned waterbeds come in three models. One is a straightforward waterbed without insulation of any kind. This model is for placing on floors which have underfloor heating. The bed efficiently transfers the warmth from the floor, giving an evenly heated upper surface for the piglets to lie on - even where the heat source is smaller than the area of the waterbed.

Another type includes an insulation layer which prevents rapid loss of heat in situations where floor heating may be turned off at times. The insulation layer also prevents undue movement of the water inside the bed. The last type also features an insulation layer inside the mattress and a black surface which allows efficient transfer of radiated heat from infrared or gas heaters to the interior water. With this last radiation model, a 250-watt lamp 50 cm above the water bed is able to maintain a surface temperature of 35C over the whole area of the bed.

Basic prices for the three models are: C$115, C$145 and C$165. The beds were all tested in trials featuring over 1,000 piglets by the German University of Giessen last year, and results indicate that litters with access to the warm waterbeds had 0.5 kg higher average weaning weight per piglet at 28 days compared with control litters on concrete or rubber floors with gas or electric radiator heating.

Compared with piglet performance on bare, insulated concrete creep floors with no underfloor heating, the waterbed litters actually gained an extra 800 grams per piglet by weaning at four weeks.

Other results indicate that the water-bed litters have fewer skin abrasions on the front legs than control groups (28.5 per cent on the seventh day as opposed to 39.7 per cent on rubber flooring and 48 per cent on bare concrete). Arthritis cases in waterbed piglets: 9.8 per cent. In litters on other floorings: 15.7 per cent.
For more information: MIK Germany, Marienstr 4, 56269 Marienhausen, Germany Tel. 011 49 2689 94 36 21; fax 011 49 2689 94 36 40; email mik@mik-online.de

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.



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