The Animal Nutrition Association of Canada is encouraging pork producers to be aware of the source of feed ingredients they bring onto their farms.
The spread of African Swine Fever in China has raised questions about the risks of transmitting that virus to North America through feed or feed ingredients imported from China.
Melissa Dumont, the Executive Director of the Animal Nutrition Association of Canada, says options for sourcing some of the ingredients used in Canada are limited.
There’s a lot of ingredients that are sourced from China that are either only manufactured there or the majority of the world’s supply is manufactured there. This is something that we are focusing on and it is something that we are talking through the International Feed Industry Federation looking at the global market place and how we put the right biosecurity measures in place to ensure that we don’t have spread of any diseases from different regions, not only in Canada. Vitamins, amino acids and minerals are common ingredients coming from China, things like Lysine, Methionine, Vitamin A Vitamin D3, many of the Vitamin Bs as well do come from China and a lot of others.
We’re not only talking two or three products that we could easily control, we’re talking 15, 20, 25 and even more different kinds of products coming from China. As well, if you are an organic producer, the thing to remember is that your soybean meal is probably coming from China as well. Unfortunately, because of the organic regulation, Canadian soybeans and soybean meal do not fit within those feeding practices because they are all GM crops so the sources have to come from a place where they are growing non-GM soybeans and that is China.
~ Melissa Dumont, Animal Nutrition Association of Canada
Dumont says, because soybeans are in the fields in China and often come in bulk, the risk profile increases. But she says just because an ingredient comes from a country with a foreign animal disease doesn’t automatically mean it’s a high risk but it’s something to keep in mind when purchasing ingredients.
