Farm-Scape, Episode 1642

The Prairie Swine Centre is encouraging increased feed testing this year to make the best use of lower quality grains.

Indications are there will be a lot of low quality wheat and barley in Western Canada this year that can be used as a feed ingredient.

Research Scientist Nutrition Dr. Ruurd Zilstra says, in the lower quality samples, there will be an increase in fibre and a decrease in the carbohydrate fraction.

"Obviously what you can do as a producer is analyze at a still relatively cheap rate for the fibre fraction and, using that information, get some indication on the digestible energy content. From there, once you have determined that the e content of your barley or wheat sample is indeed low, you can use that information to either still use that same grain sample and, by changing your diet formulation, still make sure you reach the e content that you would like to achieve.

Obviously you can also make a decision to sell the grain. A third thing that you can do is make decisions on specific classes of animals that you're going to feed the grain to.

For example, in case you still have medium or higher quality grain, you could still make decisions to for example end up feeding it to weaner pigs.

The extremely low quality grain, you could feed it for example to your gestating sows. A final consideration you could make is with regards to feed processing.

For medium and lower quality you can make a decision to add enzyme to the diet to ensure the fibre fraction will be digested properly within the pig or you could make sure that the grain is ground very finely and thereby still achieve a reasonable energy digestibility."

Dr. Zilstra says, in years like this when feed quality is so variable, feed evaluation becomes more important than ever.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.