If you've not yet had chance to catch up with the presentations and speaker videos from this year's BPEX Innovation Conference, they're all available here to view.
Meeting the exact nutrient
requirements of sows and finishers through bespoke feed rations was a key theme, with examples of how it can be done
in practice.
Producers Richard Hooper and Phil
Stephenson cited key benefits of lowering feed costs per pig, as well as a
reduction in labour intensity and less feed wastage. As a result, overall feed
savings of up to 10% were identifed, although the systems do involve high
initial investment.
Richard Hooper manages a 240-sow
indoor unit at Harper Adams University. He has introduced a ‘multifast’ feeding system that delivers a
specific blend of feed to each pen of finishers to meet each pig’s nutritonal
requirements more accurately.
Phil Stephenson, owner and manager of a
700-sow, indoor farrow-to-finish unit spoke about his Gestal wireless sow
feeding system. Phil said: “It’s used in the farrowing house and ensures that each sow
receives the correct amount of feed based on her parity. This varies between
two feeds a day up to farrowing and six feeds a day post farrowing. The system
has saved my business as much as £20,000 since installation.
“The computer software allows each
individual sow to be monitored from my office. The data produced means that I
can nip any issue in the bud before it becomes too serious.”
This tied in with another overarching
message from the conference: if you
don’t measure it, you can’t control it. In his presentation, Hugh Crabtree of
Farmex said: “Data should be turned into knowledge then used to generate
profit. Even the most experienced can learn something when they start
measuring.”
He said
there was no need to measure everything but the key elements were temperature,
water, energy, feed and growth.
“The data must be used to get more
things more right more of the time. Do that and the pigs’ biology will respond.”
There are also a few pictures from the conference here.
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