Bernie Peet

Reading Time: 3 minutes As a major pork exporter, Canada has to compete not only with the U.S. for market share, but also with countries such as Denmark and Brazil. So it s important the industry has production costs that allow it to compete effectively and also leave producers a margin. While comparing costs between various countries is fraught […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes So far this year, Canadian producers have had their best period of profitability in the last five years, a relief for those who survived a four-year period of unprecedented hardship, with low hog prices and high feed costs. With market hogs fetching up to $200 a head and sometimes more during the summer, the only […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Doing the basics well, especially during the crucial first week after weaning, is the key to successful nursery management, says Shawn Morton, who operates a 7,000-head specialist nursery barn located just east of Red Deer, Alberta. He focuses strongly on what he calls The Three Basics feed, water and environment. Combined with careful attention to […] Read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Over the last decade, the availability of dried distillers grains with solubles, or DDGS, has increased rapidly, while the price of cereal grains has escalated. This is forcing the livestock industry to take a hard look at how to utilize the byproducts of industrial processes that use not only grains, but also oilseeds and pulses. […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes With the current high feed prices, hog producers are continually looking for ways to cut costs without compromising pig performance. Nowhere is this more true than in the nursery, where the most expensive diets are consumed. Many producers are cautious about substituting cheaper raw materials for the traditional protein source of soybean meal because they […] Read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes While many producers use pigs/ sow/year as the benchmark for success in the breeding herd, there is now much more focus on lifetime productivity, driven by concern about high culling and death rates. I have discussed in the past the situation in Denmark, where sow death loss is around 15 per cent. In the U.S., […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Pelleted feed made of finely ground ingredients is considerably more efficient than more coarsely ground feed provided in meal form, according to a recently published large-scale trial carried out in Northern Ireland. Reported by Dr. Elizabeth Magowan, the work was carried out by the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) at Hillsborough in conjunction with two […] Read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes Recent research by Dr. Denise Beaulieu at the Prairie Swine Centre suggests that the response of newly weaned pigs to two dietary regimes based on a simple low-cost diet and a more complex and therefore higher-cost diet is not affected by either birth weight or creep feeding. And, surprisingly, pigs fed the more complex diet […] Read more