Prairie Swine Centre to Study Environmental Benefits of Using Paylean

CANADA - Researchers at the Prairie Swine Centre are preparing to kick off a study to examine the environmental benefits of using Paylean to improve the growth performance of grow finish hogs, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 3 April 2007
clock icon 3 minute read

Ractopamine, developed by Elanco Animal Health and marketed under the trade name Paylean, is a dietary supplement which promotes lean meat production while inhibiting fat production in hogs.

Prairie Swine Centre Research Assistant Dr. Denise Beaulieu told those attending the 2007 Focus on the Future Conference last week in Saskatoon the product's main benefit is that it allows the producer to get his animals through the barn more quickly with less feed which is also good for the environment.

Dr. Denise Beaulieu-Prairie Swine Centre

The environmental benefits primarily come from the overall improvement in efficiency in pork production.

So example come you are getting more lean meat produced for less feed so we are going to look at and see if that means there would be less nitrogen produced in the manure, less phosphorus output, less overall outputs from the animal that would be considered waste, either in the manure or as gaseous products.

There'll be two experiments.

The first experiment will be a growth experiment.

We'll be looking at the feed the animal takes in, all the nutrients in the feed and the nutrients retained in the animal so we know the efficiency of utilization of those nutrients.

Another experiment will be looking at the feed taken in versus the nutrients that are lost in either the manure or the urine so we can from the difference of that determine the outputs and inputs and there again the efficiency of utilization of those nutrients.


Dr. Beaulieu says by using an ingredient like Ractopamine, because it improves the efficiency of pork production, we are decreasing the nutrients in the manure so decreasing nitrogen and phosphorus output and perhaps also decreasing the amounts of carbon dioxide and ammonia, which are greenhouse gases.

The project is scheduled to get underway within the next month or so and is expected to take about eight months to complete.

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