Micro-management methods for intensive pig farming
Micro-level precision means haggling over every penny when bargaining, being meticulous in work, never letting go of any detail, and not allowing any negligence anywhere. Every task has details that are easily overlooked. Pay attention to them, guard against them, and our business will surely succeed.
Below are the specific details in the @#@227@#@ process:
(1) Feed
Feed costs account for more than 70% of pig farming costs, and there are many overlooked aspects of feed. Setting aside bargaining in business operations, here they are listed from a technical perspective.
1. Raw material quality
(1) Moisture in corn. Corn with 14% moisture and corn with 20% moisture cannot produce the same feed when processed. Can the formula be adjusted accordingly?
(2) Fishmeal is one of the feed ingredients with the greatest variation in nutritional content, and the practice of passing off inferior goods as superior is common.
(3) Moldy corn. After corn becomes moldy, it must not be used in large amounts in feed, but some people wash moldy corn with water, dry it, and sell it. Can you tell whether it is good or bad?
(4) Impurities in corn. When purchasing corn, you will deduct the impurities in the corn proportionally, but when mixing feed, do you also take the impurities into account?
(5) Some nutrients in premixes and concentrated feeds are continuously lost as time goes on. When we use feed that is close to its expiration date, do we consider that these components are insufficient and supplement them?
(6) People today must use iodized salt for human consumption. In the same area, could the iodine deficiency in people also mean a deficiency in pigs? How many feed mills use iodized salt for pigs?
(7) There are relevant standards for using limestone powder as feed, but nowadays it is rare to see limestone powder packaging with a clear factory address, contact information, and ingredient content.
(8) The protein content of soybean meal varies widely, and with some artificial adulteration, it varies even more. How many operations conduct laboratory analysis on every batch purchased?
2. Feed formulation
Feed formulation is about achieving as balanced a supply of nutrients as possible, at least a balance of the main components. What pigs need is effective nutrition, not an accumulation of nutrients. Only by considering the various influencing factors in the utilization of the main nutrients can a true balance be achieved.
(1) The energy-to-protein ratio, more precisely the ratio of digestible energy to digestible protein. Digestible energy can be found in books, but the digestibility of protein is affected by many factors and is not a fixed figure. One common mistake is treating crude protein as digestible protein; another mistake is simply adding up the digestible protein values introduced in reference materials. The most reasonable ratio needs to be verified in practice.
(2) Calcium-to-phosphorus ratio. In general feed, the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio is mostly 1-1.5:1, but in reality, the two should not be constant either. In particular, phytic acid phosphorus in feed is not easily utilized, and its content will directly affect the value of phosphorus use. The proportion of inorganic phosphorus in the feed and whether phytase is added have a great influence on the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio.
(3) Among amino acids, the ratio among lysine, methionine-cystine, and threonine. For growing pigs, lysine is the first limiting amino acid. People will simply add lysine to a very high level and then consider it high-quality feed. In fact, if a limiting amino acid reaches a certain amount, it is no longer a limiting amino acid. After lysine is satisfied, threonine or methionine-cystine may become the first limiting amino acid. Under normal conditions, the ratio of lysine, methionine-cystine, and threonine is 1:0.6:0.65. While adding lysine, do not forget the other two.
(4) Feed formulas should be combined with climate (temperature). Changes in environmental temperature will cause changes in pigs' needs for different nutrients. For example, feeding high-energy feed in high-temperature seasons or low-energy feed in cold seasons is inappropriate, and it will cause deficiencies in some nutrients and excesses in others. In a nursery barn with a temperature below 20°C, giving piglets high-protein feed (higher than 18%) results in slow growth and susceptibility to illness.
(5) Feed formulation should change with raw material composition. Pig nutritional needs are the adjusting lever. When raw materials change, the feed formula should also change. Using corn with 30% moisture to replace corn with 14% moisture can only cause severe energy deficiency.
3. Feed processing
Feed processing has a great impact on feed. Different feeding stages have different requirements for grinding particle size. Feed that is too fine fed to adult pigs easily causes gastric ulcers, while feed that is too coarse fed to piglets is not easily digested.
Uneven feed mixing is very obvious in many pig farms. For example, a vertical mixer needs to mix for 12 minutes, and a horizontal mixer needs 6-8 minutes. The consequence of uneven mixing is that some or even all of it fails to achieve full-price completeness, which greatly reduces the utilization effect of the feed.