Brumm Speaks Out

I spent 4 days this week in 2 2500 sow breed-to-wean units ear tagging 5 day old pigs on their birth litters as part of an upcoming research project. I don’t normally spend much time in sow units, other than to help them with ventilation issues. Being in the units and working side by side with the employees made me appreciate even more the effort that goes into the weaned pigs that many of us receive in our nurseries and wean-finish facilities.

In the September USDA Hogs and Pigs report, US producers averaged 9.7 pigs weaned per litter for all litters weaned in June, July and August of this year. To get this weaned average meant the average US producer farrowed almost 11 live pigs per litter. This means our top producers are weaning 10.5+ pigs per litter and farrowing over 12 pigs per litter. We now routinely talk about a goal of 30 pigs weaned per mated female per year, with some hinting at even higher numbers in the not so distant future. Add to this the fact that as we increase weaning age, we are now often producing a weaned pig at 21-22 days of age that averages 14+ pounds.

Think about the attention to detail required in a farrowing unit to attain these types of production numbers. While I knew in a general way what it takes to make these numbers happen, it was a good refresher for me to see how dedicated the staff is in these units in doing all of the little things right.

As we were working in farrowing rooms, if they heard a pig squealing from being laid on by a sow, someone immediately sprang into action to get that condition corrected. If there was a starve-out pig in a litter, someone was looking after the pig and/or moving the pig to a nurse sow where the pig would have a better opportunity for survival.

Because there had been PRRS in the units in the past year, they were very conscious of bio-security. This included dipping of all processing implements between litters to reduce possible blood transfer between pigs via open wounds. To reduce scour spread, processing carts with solid flooring had the litter absorbent material in the cart replaced between rooms. And the list goes on of the little things they were doing right.

Hats off to the many people who spend their day in sow units. I have spent a career as a wean-finish specialist and felt somewhat out of place in the farrowing units. However, I did recognize that because of the efforts of the people at farrowing sites, I have plenty of weaned pigs to place in my facilities.

Of course, there will be those that say we have a lower market price because we have gotten so good at farrowing and weaning pigs. The reality is that because of the genetic potential of our breeding herd and the application of management techniques by the people at the farrowing sites, we will need less females in the breeding herd going into the future.

The long and dreary harvest season, when combined with the continued lack of optimism for next summers hog market has many of the readers of this blog concerned about their future in agriculture. I thought I use this week’s blog to share some personal news that should brighten the day for many of you.

As many of the readers of this blog are aware, I retired from the University of Nebraska just over 3 years ago and relocated to North Mankato, Minnesota. The reason for the retirement and relocation wasn’t that I was at the normal age of retirement or that I had family in the Mankato area. My wife and I undertook this entire adventure on behalf of our youngest daughter, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had a stroke during her gestation which resulted in her brain not forming correctly. As a result, she has faced a lifetime of challenges. In addition, she requires 24 hour care and supervision for all of her daily needs. While Wayne, Nebraska was a great place to raise Liz’s older siblings, the opportunities for Liz were becoming very limiting. Liz will be 20 yrs old in December and the population base of northeast Nebraska isn’t big enough to have the type of lifetime services that Liz requires. If we had stayed in rural Nebraska, lifetime placement services for Liz would most likely have been in Omaha or Lincoln, over 100 miles distant.

Thus the early retirement and relocation to Minnesota by my wife and I. Based on our conversations with parents, special education administrators, etc., we felt that the Mankato area was large enough to have the services Liz requires, and we felt the state of Minnesota in general had more resources available than did Nebraska.

The move has been everything we’ve hoped for our daughter. She has grown in so many ways from the additional opportunities that the Mankato school district and the community of Mankato provide.

We are now faced with the biggest opportunity of all – a chance to place Liz in a caring environment that might be her home for the future years. We began the process this week of transitioning Liz from living with us 24 hours per day to living in a home about 5 minutes from us.

While most of you have agonized about your children’s future and shed tears of joy and sadness when they went out on their own, we will be at another level of joy and sadness. Right now, we do everything for Liz, from feeding her to changing her diaper to dressing her. We have many talented PCA’s (Personal Care Assistant’s) who come into our home almost daily to assist us, but our lives are dominated by our concerns and the care needs of Liz.

When she leaves our home to be under the watchful care of a professional organization, it will be very tough on my wife and I. While we have a lot of anxiety over the decision process that is facing us in the next 2-3 months, we are overwhelmed with joy that the reason for the move to Mankato appears to be happening, even in spite of severe budget problems for the state of Minnesota and Nicollet county.

The good news is that my little girl is growing up, even with her many limitations. Thank you to the citizens of Minnesota who have created a system that will allow her to continue to grow at a location whereby we can still be involved in her life on a daily basis.

It’s Monday afternoon and I’ve delayed writing this weekend’s blog due to a hectic schedule of telephone calls on Friday. A majority of the calls were related to the many foaming issues many producers in the upper Midwest are reporting in their manure pits.

While there have been occasional reports of pits foaming in previous years, this year the problem seems to be much bigger. On Friday I was on a conference call with a group of ag engineers and animal scientists about the problem. So far, we can find no common thread between sites and/or buildings within a site for the problem.

In general, the foam seems to be coming up thru the slats (or growing in depth under the slats) faster when there are no pigs in a facility. This is most likely due to the fact that feces, urine and other materials dropping thru the slots in the slats are breaking up the foam bubbles. When the barns are empty, there is nothing to break up the bubbles.

What is so confusing about the whole foam issue is that I have had reports of one room of a double-wide having foam and the other room being fine, or 2 of 4 barns at a grow-fin site having foam. All pigs are the same age, fed the same diet, from the same source, etc. Why one pit foams and another doesn’t is the mystery.

What can producers do about the foam? Again, not many good answers. Some have tried adding 5 gal of diesel fuel at the agitation pump – this doesn’t always work, and it is not environmentally friendly. An alternative that has been tried in past years has been crop oil, but like the diesel fuel, it doesn’t work in all cases. Ag engineers at the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois are working this week with commercial de-foaming agents such as are used in municipal sewage plants. They are working with cooperating producers to see if any of these products is effective and affordable for dealing with the foaming issue.

In empty facilities, some producers have reported that turning on sprinklers has reduced the foam. At the same time, they all comment that the odor when the foam is reduced is terrible in the facility.

Is the foam contributing to the explosion risk? Again, no good answers. It does appear that the foam is retaining high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans and methane in the unburst bubbles. If the foam is retaining these explosive compounds, in cases of minimal or no ventilation do they get to high enough levels to be explosive when a spark is provided? Again, no good answers. Methane and hydrogen sulfide are explosive at 4% or 40,000 ppm. Hydrogen sulfide is deadly at much lower levels. The nose becomes insensitive to it around 150-200 ppm and by 500 ppm it causes death.

At this point in time, the recommendation is to always have ventilation operating when doing anything with a manure pit, even if the barn is empty. Turn off all pilot lights, feed augers, etc so they don’t provide an ignition source. Hang lock-out tags on all entry points to the facility (available from your state pork producer association office or National Pork Board). Don’t agitate manure until it is 2 ft below the slat so that pit fans have enough head room to function in assisting ventilating the pits. Don’t break the surface with agitation as this has been proven to significantly increase the release of gas from a pit.

All of these cautions sound good when written, but in the next 5 weeks I’m sure a lot of mistakes will be made. All of the rain delays have meant that no manure has been pumped for 2-3 weeks in the upper Midwest. At some sites, even if the manure crew was ready and the ground was dry, the corn or beans weren’t out yet so no place to go with the manure.

Assuming a normal fall freeze-up, injection of manure on crop ground will have to be completed by Thanksgiving for much of the Midwest. This means in the next 5 weeks, over 60% of all the manure in grow-finish barns in the US must be land applied if it is to be injected. At the same time, we’re fighting to get crops out of the field and fall tillage done. This suggests that mistakes will be made in the rush to completion. My plea – even if you are pressed for time, be sure and take the safety precautions necessary when dealing with manure. Haste does not make waste in this case. Haste and waste equal the risk of tragic circumstances.

With predictions of another week of wet weather in the upper Midwest, harvest of corn and soybeans will lag even further behind the 5 year average. In conversations with producers, I’m hearing reports of stalk rot and other stand problems.

Along with stand issues, conditions are ripe across much of the corn belt for an increase in corn quality problems associated with mold growth. This week I learned of one producer who has combined corn from 2 different locations and both sites tested above 4 ppm DON (deoxynivalenol or vomitoxin) and zearalenone. His agronomist has since visited many of his fields, and all have noticeable mold growth on the ear tips, suggesting a good share of the harvest will have quality issues.

In reviewing a NebGuide on grain molds from the University of Nebraska written by Dr Jim Stack, extension plant pathologist, mold growth can be expected to increase in years of stress, such as high moisture in mid-to-late season after a dry summer. After only 10.4 inches of rain from April 1 to September 25 in the Mankato area, the 5+ inches since then fit this description of circumstances very well.

For those that sell corn, many country elevators use long wave length ultraviolet light (blacklight) as a screen for the presence of mold growth. This is not a reliable test for corn destined for human or pig consumption as many molds and mold toxins do not fluoresce under black light. In addition, many compounds unrelated to mold or mold growth will fluoresce. On the other hand, grossly molded grain may contain no detectable toxins that impact pig performance.

Fungi capable of producing mycotoxins include Aspergillus, Fusarium, Penicillium and others. Toxins produced by the Fusarmium species include DON and Zearalenone, contaminants in the producer’s grain mentioned earlier. Infected corn kernels may be pink or show a white starburst pattern radiating from the top of the kernel.

DON is concern at levels of 1 ppm or higher in swine diets as pigs refuse to eat feeds with grain at this level of contamination. In general, at levels of DON contamination above 1 ppm, pigs will immediately try to sort feeds in an attempt to locate particles not contaminated. With complete diets now routinely ground to a particle size of 700 microns, sorting is not an option for the pig, so a reduction in feed intake occurs. As levels of DON increase, there may be total feed refusal. I had this experience more than 10 years ago in my research unit at the University of Nebraska, and it is humbling to see feeders full of what appear to be very good quality feed, and pigs refusing to eat.

There are very few binders that can be added to swine diets when DON contamination occurs. The general recommendation is to blend the contaminated corn with non-contaminated corn until the combined corn DON level is below 1 ppm. This suggests if you’ve got old crop corn, use it sparingly in pig diets until you have some experience with new crop corn – you may need it to blend down toxin levels.

Zearalenone mimics reproductive hormones. In grow-finish gilts, there is often vulval swelling, while in breeding herds a variety of reproductive failures can occur. In general, toxin binders are more likely to be effective in zearalenone contaminated feed stuffs.

Many state veterinary diagnostic laboratories can furnish information on testing for toxins and guidance on levels of concern in swine diets. Having been a faculty member at the University of Nebraska for so many years, I continue to rely on the information from there. An excellent series of NebGuides on mold and mycotoxins can be found at:

http://www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/epublic/live/g1513/build/g1513.pdf

http://www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/epublic/live/g1514/build/g1514.pdf

http://www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/epublic/live/g1515/build/g1515.pdf

For many years, following the release of the quarterly USDA hogs and pigs report I write a commentary on the changing structure of the US industry as documented by the numbers in these reports. This commentary is circulated via email and continues to be posted at the University of Nebraska’s Pork Central Website (www.porkcentral.unl.edu). The following is the text of this report. The report itself also included 26 graphs. If you would like to be included in the email distribution of this report, please reply with a comment to this blog and I will add your email address to the distribution list.

As always, this USDA provided several interesting data points that highlight the on-going structural changes in the US pork industry.

To begin with, the 35,000 head decline from one year ago in the breeding herd in Texas almost exactly matches the numbers announced by Smithfield for their closure of their Dalhart, Texas locations. Similarly, the reduction in the Arkansas breeding herd number aligns with the announcement by Tyson of a reduction in their breeding herd numbers.

Other than these 2 announced large declines in breeding herd inventories, the reductions in the US herd were scattered and rather minimal. The US breeding herd stood at 96.9% of the September 1, 2008 number. When combined with the continued improvements in breeding herd efficiencies, there was limited data in this report to suggest a rapid reduction in the flow of pigs to slaughter in the coming months.

Further proof of this unwillingness to aggressively slow production is the fact that farrowing intentions for the September thru November period were 97% of the 2008 period. Assuming producers maintain a 9.7 pig per litter average, versus the 9.50 average of the same period in 2008, the pig crop will be an estimated 28.47 million pigs, down only 300 thousand from the 2008 September thru November crop of 28.77 million pigs. This amounts to only 23,000 fewer pigs per week, not much of a change in total slaughter numbers.

Another sign of a unwillingness to slow production is the price of SEW and 40 pound feeder pigs as reported every Friday by USDA. The average open market delivered price for SEW pigs has risen from a low of $6.91 per head for the week ending August 21 to $23.49 per head for this past week, an increase of  $16.58 per pig in only 5 weeks. Likewise, the average delivered cash price of 40 pound pigs went from $10.43 per pig for the week ending August 14 to $27.43 this past week, an increase of $17 per pig. Both the sharp rise in weaned and feeder pig prices and the decline in feed grain prices (new crop corn closed under $3 per bushel local bid this afternoon) has somewhat eased the pressure for breed to wean producers to sell sows.

At the same time, Iowa producers are showing no willingness to leave finishing facilities empty. Iowa now has 18.4 pigs in the kept for market category for every animal in the breeding inventory. Minnesota has 12.0 and Indiana has 11.9, reflective of their continued growth in finishing relative to farrowing inventories. As a point of reference, the US average is 10.3 market inventory per breeding inventory, the highest ever.

These numbers highlight the on-going advances in productivity of the US breeding herd. For the period June thru August period, the US herd averaged 9.70 pigs per litter, the highest pig crop per litter ever, up from the 9.61 average for the March thru May period of 2009.

The Canadian sow inventory continues to slowly decline. Border crossings of sows and boars destined for slaughter has averaged just over 14,000 animals per week since June 1, up from 11,000 per week last year for the same time period. Their next inventory will be taken on October 1.