Prairie Swine Centre Seminars to Focus on Cost Saving Management Practices

CANADA - To help pork producers trim production costs and reduce losses during the low end of the price cycle the Prairie Swine Centre will be hosting a series of information meetings across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 15 February 2008
clock icon 3 minute read

In response to the economic challenges faced by pork producers the Prairie Swine Centre is replacing this year's Focus on the Future Conference with a series of smaller, more personal meetings to be held across western Canada.

The meetings will look at about a dozen best management practices producers can use immediately to cut costs.

Information services manager Lee Whittington notes the three big costs on any farm are feed, utilities and labour, with feed costs being the most significant.

Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre

We want to talk about some of our research on energy values and how you set the energy value of feed.

We're saying that energy values need to fluctuate to match how much the pork prices are and what the feed ingredient prices are.

Right now we can see a variation of anywhere from one to 13 dollars per pig if we choose one energy value formulation over another.

Another one is looking at, once you have that feed program designed, how do we budget it on the farm, how many kilograms per pig at each stage of their life and once we've established that budget, the next thing to do is make sure that what's actually going in the tank and eventually into the feeder is actually what we had planned on and we find by doing an analysis or an audit ever month, two months, three months, we typically find anywhere from three, five to six dollars per pig in savings by getting back to our original budget.


Sessions will be held in Manitoba at Portage La Prairie Tuesday and Niverville Wednesday and meetings are being planned for Saskatchewan and Alberta in early April and are open to all pork producers and their suppliers.

© 2000 - 2025 - Global Ag Media. All Rights Reserved | No part of this site may be reproduced without permission.