Brumm Speaks Out

As frequent readers of the blog are aware, I have an interest in the structure of the pig industry world wide. Such things as what countries are major producers of pork, trends in their production numbers, etc. The US is the world’s second largest country producing pork, with China 4-5x larger than the US in production. We are all aware of the impact of Chinese trade on our markets, with the recent decision of Chinese authorities to reopen their borders to US pork products welcomed by all.

In terms of being a supplier to world trade, China is not a concern, as they consume almost 100% of the pork they produce, with few plants in the country able to certify to world sanitary standards. However, Canada and the European Union are major suppliers of product to most of our foreign markets.

This past week I have been looking at the pork production numbers from the European Union members. If you are interested in delving further into the following numbers or have an interest in other European Union statistics, both ag and non-ag, you can go to the following website:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/eurostat/home

The EU requires member countries to report/estimate livestock inventories every November/December. The following table has the total pig inventories of the 6 countries in the EU with the largest inventories of pigs. To give me a point of reference, I also added the December 1 numbers from Iowa for each year in the table.

While we often hear about pork production in Denmark, they rank number 5 in the EU, and are an industry in a state of flux. Germany has the most pigs, and increasingly, these pigs are being born in Denmark and shipped to Germany as weaned pigs (sounds just like the Canadian and US situation doesn’t it). Spain has shown consistent growth over the 8 year period in the graph and is now a close second in inventory.

The pig numbers in Poland have taken a sharp down turn in the past 2 years, so much so that they now have less pigs than France. Their 2008 inventory is only 75% of the 2002 peak or 76% of the 2006 inventory. France, Denmark and the Netherlands have all shown steady to slowly declining inventories over the 8 year period.

I included Iowa inventory numbers in the table as a reference point. If Iowa were a member of the EU, it would be the 3^rd largest pig producer. In the world of pig production, Iowa would rank as the 5^th largest country, behind China, US, Germany and Spain. On December 1, 2008, Iowa had 29.6% of all pigs in the US herd.

For the past 10 days I’ve been looking at temperatures and associated controller settings from data loggers that were placed in producer facilities in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio in preparation for a series of ventilation workshops next week. We’ve done this at other locations around the Midwest in previous years, and the results this year were not different or surprising. There are a lot of controllers set wrong in production facilities, with the result being excessive propane usage and significant over ventilation of facilities, especially at the time of pig placement.

A common problem that I see repeatedly is furnace settings that are too close to the set point of the controller. The bigger the furnace relative to the space being heated, the bigger this problem is. After the furnace shuts off following a heating cycle, the air temperature as recorded by the ventilation controller probe(s), should never get to set point. A general recommendation to prevent this from happening is to have the furnace shut off at 2 degrees below the controller set point.

However, in cases where the furnaces are severely over-sized, this isn’t enough. I was in a farrowing unit a few weeks ago where the controller was programmed to turn off the room furnace at 1.5 degrees below the set point. Every time the furnace cycled, the room temperature climbed to 0.8 degrees above set point. In just about every controller, if room temperature increases above the set point by 0.1 degree, the ventilation system responds by increasing the ventilation rate to remove the excess heat. In the case of the farrowing unit, the furnace off temperature in the controller had to be set at 2.5 degrees below the set point to prevent this from happening.

In general, furnaces in production facilities are over sized. A furnace is big enough if it shuts off on the coldest day of the year. Sounds simple, yet too many producers size furnaces with the goal of minimizing run time – if it runs very long I must be wasting heat! The longer the furnace runs on each on-cycle, the more uniform the heat distribution in the animal space since the furnace fan is circulating warm air. If the furnace cycles relatively fast (on time is only a few minutes), the fan doesn’t have time to circulate air uniformly through out the heated space. The result is more variation in temperature with every cycle.

If you have a furnace installed that is a variable output furnace (LB White Guardian and PSI are 2 brands that have this option), it should be turned to low output at this time of the year. If your furnace has a ‘blue’ valve between the control module and the flame, it is most likely a variable output furnace. If you turn the valve to the right, you will decrease the size of the flame and the heat output. While the furnace will run longer per cycle, the total gas usage will be the same, or even less, than a short run-time at full output. Don’t turn the flame to full output until the furnace runs 100% of the time. As long as the furnace turns off on occasion, it is putting out enough heat.

Over-sized furnaces are a common problem in farrowing and nursery rooms. I’ve seen 250,000 btu furnaces installed where a 60,000 btu furnace would be enough because the bigger furnace was ‘a better buy (more btu’s per dollar spent)’. The net result is that air temperatures often cycle as much as 8+ degrees every time the furnace cycles, which is not acceptable for best pig performance. It has been demonstrated that weaned pigs performance declines if they are faced with temperature fluctuations of 4 degrees or more per hour. It is not uncommon to have as many as 6 to 8 temperature swings per hour in rooms with over sized furnaces.

A good way to tell if your controller is set correctly is to record the controller set point and the daily high temperature as recorded in your controller. The daily high should never get to the set point temperature when you are in full furnace mode in a room. My goal is to have the daily high peak at about 0.2 degrees below the room set point. This ensures that the ventilation system won’t increase the ventilation rate and exhaust the added heat in response to the heat addition.

It’s 63 F degrees outside this afternoon and I think every combine in the state of Minnesota is being used to harvest corn and soybeans. What a difference in attitude Indian Summer brings, especially when it arrives this late in the season and after such a frustrating October. Yield reports have been mixed on soybeans, mostly related to whether the producer got any rainfall in August or early September. Corn yield reports are all very good. Even with the dry summer for much of this area, reports of 200+ bu/ac are relatively common. Hopefully the wind and warm temps this weekend will dry the corn down a few points so that the pace of harvest can pick up even faster.

So far in southern Minnesota, I’ve heard few reports of fusarium mold in corn. There are quite a few reports coming from Indiana and Ohio on moldy corn problems. Purdue University has had many press releases on the topic, along with links to web sites for detailed information. One can only hope that days like today and what is expected this weekend will prevent any further mold growth and the resultant mycotoxins in the grain.

The return to field work has also meant many commercial manure applicators (commonly called pit pumpers in our area) have been working around the clock to make up for the lost month of October. Since the middle of October when there were reports of barn explosions, there have been no more reports that I am aware of. On a conference call this morning sponsored by NPPC this morning, the production systems that participated indicated no further explosions either.

At the same time, there has not been a decrease in pit foaming problems or calls. Both the National Pork Board and National Pork Producers Association, along with many state associations, are working with university specialists on this problem. All of the producers and production systems that have been involved in conference calls regarding this issue have pledged to offer what information and samples they can to researchers who are addressing this problem. While the mechanisms responsible for the foaming aren’t understood yet, I’m confident that producer cooperation with the scientific community will shed light on the problem relatively soon.

For now, those with foaming problems in their pits are being advised to use their sprinkler systems to knock down the foam when necessary. I have had no reports of success or failure with commercial anti-foaming products that might be added to manure pits.

We had the pits pumped this weekend at the SVC Research sites. One site had just been emptied of pigs and will fill with weaned pigs on Monday. The other site has pigs that averaged 140 pounds during the pumping. These facilities are tunnel barns, and the site manager turned on several of the tunnel fans in both barns. During the period of pumping, barn temperatures got into the upper 40’s, but we lost no pigs. I was in the facility 2 days after pumping and the pigs looked great.

It is interesting to note that the pigs in this facility just prior to pumping were gaining at over 2 lb/day and I expect this to increase in the next weigh period as the pigs aren’t at the weight that they typically peak in growth rate. I’m guessing with the cool fall weather, most sites have had very good gains this fall, even without the ‘new corn’ spurt in feed intake that is typically seen due to the lack of new corn at many country elevators.