The addition of a new research nutritionist to the staff of the Prairie Swine Centre will enhance the facility’s ability to anticipate and address the evolving nutritional needs of the Canadian swine industry.
Earlier this month the Saskatoon based Prairie Swine Centre announced the recruitment of Dr. LeAnn Johnston to the dual role as manager of the centre’s Contract Research Group and nutrition research scientist.
President and CEO Lee Whittington notes the Prairie Swine Centre bridges three disciplines, nutrition, engineering and behavior but it’s traditionally emphasized nutrition.
The key priorities in nutrition will be two-fold.
One is looking at the ingredients that are available especially unique, perhaps low cost ingredients that we have in western Canada that they don’t have anywhere else.
A lot of times that comes down to some fairly mundane things like frozen wheat, frozen canola, distressed barley but those things can be a huge opportunity factor for an individual farm especially if they can buy them priced right.
Somewhere around 60 to 65 percent of the cost of production revolves around nutrition therefor if you’re going to make a significant change on a farm and make that change quickly there’s no better place to do it than nutrition.
There’s a lot of opportunity to save costs, to improve efficiency and you can do it quickly.
I think that’s that other motivation for wanting to make sure that we stay at the forefront of nutrition research is it’s something the industry can grasp and adopt quickly.
You change an idea today, you change the diet tomorrow, the pigs start responding within a day or two.
There aren’t too many other areas in which we can have that significant an impact in such a short period of time.
Whittington says the centre has been rationalizing facilities, activities and people and reinvesting in its ability to provide nutritional breakthroughs will offer immediate and lasting returns on investment.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
