Practical Ways to Reduce Feeding Costs in Pig Farming
How to reduce pig feeding costs: check your feeding program and improve it. Keep in mind that a good feeding program involves several key points. These points include: monitoring pig growth performance, selecting feed ingredients, making formulas, implementing a quality control program, monitoring costs, and reducing feed waste, among others. Listed below are some tips for improving the economic efficiency of your feeding program.
1. Choosing improved crossbred pigs is one of the effective measures for improving pig production. In modern pig production in China, most operations use three-way crossbred pigs.
2. Seek various feed ingredients to meet the pig's nutritional needs, including amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and energy. This gives you more options, for example using a base mix instead of a concentrate, or replacing corn with wheat middlings, fats and oils, yellow corn, or DDGS (distillers dried grains with solubles). You may also need to replace part of the soybean meal with meat and bone meal or crystalline amino acids. When choosing among different ingredients, you should follow a certain standard, for example, the lysine level of the diet; decide what lysine level you want the diet to reach, and then select feed ingredients according to that standard.
3. Based on your actual situation and the service quality of suppliers, realistically consider whether to use complete feed, concentrate, base mix, or premix.
4. Make sure the nutrient content of the diet exactly meets the pig's needs (no more, no less), unless the excess serves to improve feed conversion efficiency, daily gain, reproductive performance, or carcass quality. Some producers always add unnecessary dietary components that do not help improve production performance, or add excessive trace minerals and vitamins.
5. Adjust the diet according to current production conditions. Nutrient levels should be neither too high nor too low. You should track indicators such as the pig's fat-free lean gain rate, feed intake, and 21-day litter weight, and precisely adjust the diet formula based on these indicators. On how to measure pig growth performance and determine nutritional needs based on growth performance.
6. Note that you should not provide excessive nutrients to pigs weighing 86 kg. Pigs at this stage consume one-third of the total feed, but lean gain has already declined by this point.
7. Feed according to a budget: after feeding a certain amount of each diet, lower the nutrient concentration of the diet, gradually reducing the nutritional level of the diet according to plan, rather than guessing the pig's body weight and formulating the diet based on that weight.
8. Feed separately by sex; barrows have lower amino acid requirements than gilts, especially after reaching 36 kg body weight.
9. Use phased feeding; from weaning to market there should be at least 7 phases, feeding 7 different diets.
10. Carefully evaluate the economic benefits of adding growth-promoting antibiotics during the growing-finishing phase. Consider how much the antibiotics cost, how much production performance improves, and whether it is worthwhile.
11. The average particle diameter of ground feed should be controlled at 650 to 750 microns. For every 100-micron reduction in particle diameter, feed conversion efficiency improves by 1.2%. For every 1.2% improvement in feed conversion efficiency, you can earn an extra 0.5 USD per pig. If you have not tested feed particle size for half a year, it is recommended that you send a feed sample to a laboratory for analysis right now.
12. Update the breeding herd in a timely manner, using boars and sows with higher lean meat percentage. Producing fat consumes four times more energy than producing lean meat.
13. Improve the health status of the herd. If nutrients are used to fight disease, then that portion of nutrients can no longer be used for weight gain and becomes wasted. All-in, all-out is an excellent feeding method for ensuring herd health.
14. A euthanasia procedure for pigs should be established; discuss the existing euthanasia procedure with your veterinarian and staff. Pigs with poor production performance consume large amounts of feed and increase medication costs; such pigs should be euthanized and culled.
15. Buy feed in bulk together with other pig farms so you can get a price discount. Focus your attention on herd performance. If measures related to feed ingredients or feeding strategies do not improve herd performance, do not consider them.
16. Investigate the feasibility of purchasing bulk feed ingredients, and consider not using bagged ingredients.
17. Consider processing feed into pellets. Corn or yellow corn-soybean diets can improve feed conversion efficiency by 5% to 8% after pelleting. The efficiency improvement brought by pelleting often offsets the cost increase caused by rising feed prices.
18. Set realistic feed cost targets; you need to understand the herd's feed conversion efficiency, daily gain, feed cost per unit of carcass or pork, and output per unit of feed cost. In short, determine as many indicators as possible, and use these indicators to decide where else improvements can be made. When feeding self-mixed feed, according to the different types of pigs, the different nutrient requirements of growing pigs at different stages, and the nutritional characteristics of various ingredients, mix multiple ingredients into a complete feed, so that nutrition is comprehensive without waste and the feed-to-weight ratio is reduced. At the same time, pay attention to providing sufficient drinking water; water shortage will significantly affect the pig's appetite, digestion, and normal growth, thereby reducing feed utilization.
19. Adjust feeders frequently to minimize feed waste. Generally, feed should not exceed 50% of the feeder pan capacity.
20. Note that minimizing feed cost per unit of carcass does not mean achieving the highest benefit. In other words, the indicator of feed cost per unit of carcass cannot determine the most profitable nutritional program. To precisely formulate a nutritional program, you need to consider overall costs and benefits and conduct a partial budget.
21. Strive for open communication with feed suppliers. When problems arise, open communication helps solve them.
22. Establish a quality control program, whether the feed or feed ingredients are purchased from outside or grown and mixed on your own. Key physical properties and nutritional indicators of diets and feed ingredients should be monitored.
23. Consider setting feed ingredient prices in advance in order to control price risk (for example, through forward basis contracts, formula price contracts, option contracts, futures contracts, or forward cash contracts).
24. Establish certain procedures for the purchase and delivery of feed and feed ingredients in order to minimize the risk of disease transmission at this stage.
25. Some information is important for formulating feeding strategies but cannot be determined; in such cases, this information can be obtained through carefully selected, well-designed production trials.
26. Estimate the total cost of self-produced feed (fixed costs plus operating costs) and compare it with purchased feed. For some pig farms, self-production may not be worthwhile, because the cost of custom processing is much lower.
27. Follow the biological chain: pig manure is used to feed fly maggots and earthworms. The leftovers from fly maggot production are used to feed earthworms, and then the leftovers from earthworms become pollution-free organic fertilizer. It can be used to grow pollution-free vegetables. Fly maggots and earthworms can be used to raise pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, rice field eels, and loaches. Using pig manure can reduce feeding costs. Mixing your own feed can reduce feed costs. If you put all of these to use, then the cost of raising pigs is reduced, and making money becomes easier.