US: Swine producers share strategies at Purina event
Purina Animal Nutrition hosted its annual Swine VIP event last month in St. Louis, Mo. More than 70 producers, representing over 1.25 million pigs from eight states, attended the meeting to hear the latest research in wean-to-finish swine production.
“The goal of our VIP events is to provide research and information to producers so they can take that information back to their farms and improve efficiencies and profit potential,” says Dari Brown, Ph.D., director livestock young animal marketing with Purina Animal Nutrition. “The combination of industry experts and producer conversations helped attendees bring home information from this Swine Wean-to-Finish VIP.”
The two-day event included presentations on pig nutrition, facility management, nutrient management and the economics of managing feed efficiency through times of high feed costs. Presentations were provided from Purina Animal Nutrition, AgStar Financial Services, Elanco and DSM Nutritional Products.
A panel discussion gave producers the opportunity to hear from their peers who had: tightened market windows by feeding younger pigs correctly; seen the benefits of increasing weaning age; and seen improvements in air quality and pig performance after adding EcoCare feed.
Producers also had the opportunity to see research at the 1,188-acre Purina Animal Nutrition Center in Gray Summit, Mo. Attendees had a chance to tour the 200-sow farrow to finish swine research facility and discussed several of the 35 current swine research trials that are conducted yearly at the farm, many of which are focusing on improving feed efficiency and performance in the nursery and grow/finish stages.
One study of interest is a recent trial with the line of UltraCare feed products and recent enhancements to the product. Feeding trials comparing the original UltraCare feed products to the new UltraCare pig starter feed products show significant benefits in the nursery and growing stages, that demonstrated up to: 15 percent greater early feed intake; 24.3 percent greater early gain; 11.8 percent enhanced early feed efficiency; 4.6 percent improvement in late nursery feed efficiency; and a 2.7 pound greater nursery exit weight at 50 days of age.
Producers in attendance praised the event for its variety of “practical and useful topics,” saying that information was “applicable to today’s production systems.”
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