General News

The reduced maize price has given our industry buoyancy that it has not had for a while. The pork and broiler industries are particularly upbeat at the moment while the egg industry is still languishing in a low price oversupply situation. Unfortunately the price of maize is firming on the back of a weak Rand and the price of many of our protein sources have increased as well. At the time of writing the foot and mouth situation in Natal has not resolved itself. This is obviously cause for concern.

I have recently had occasion to page through the back issue of the Journal of Applied Poultry Research. In the process I have found a host of forgotten (or never read) articles that are very relevant. I have included some of the findings from these papers in this newsletter.

In our last newsletter we reported on a trial that tested the phosphorus availability of Biofos 21. We have had some objections to the statement that "Biofos 21 can therefore be considered as good a phosphate source for poultry as any other on the market". We apologise for this unscientific comment and for any offence that it may have caused. What this sentence should have said is that the phosphorus availability of Biofos 21 did not differ significantly from the material it was tested against.

I spent some time with Rob Gous at the University of Natal’s research farm in September. It was very encouraging to see just how the farm has developed in the last 10 years, despite budgetary constraints that are far more severe than those seen in the US and Canada (see my article on my visit). New facilities include two controlled environmental broiler houses, a bank of cages for younger broilers (replacing battery brooders), a new feed mill, a new piggery and new broiler breeder facilities. The package is rounded off by technical support from Dudley Tutt and his skilled team. Rob is using the facilities to their best advantage and is probably doing more research now than at any other time in his career.

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As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, changes in computer operating systems and user preferences may well spell the end of the SPESFEED Feed Formulation system. We do not have the skills or the time to migrate the SPESFEED program to Windows. For this reason we have approached FORMAT INTERNATIONAL for help, and together we will be marketing a new Windows based feed formulation program called SPESMIX.

Those who know the Format system will find that SPESMIX looks and feels like FORMAT NC’s Single-Mix package. It has full Format and Windows functionality at the Single-Mix level. There are a number of restrictions though. SPESMIX will only handle 13 time periods, 50 raw materials and 50 products. The cost of the program will be US$ 1000.00 (R 7500.00). An annual support fee of R 1500.00 will be available, which will entitle the user to free upgrades as well as support.

We have just completed another successful pig nutrition course with 22 people from various branches of industry attending. It was particularly good to have a large number of producers on the course.

We have made some provisional dates for next year’s courses. The first course that we will hold will be in conjunction with Format International and will in essence be an introduction to feed formulation. This will take place on 30 and 31 of January. The poultry course will be held from March 27 to 29, the Dairy course in June and the pig course next September. Our venue at the Country Club is in the process of being rebuilt so we should have good new facilities by next year.

Perhaps the phrase B2B does not mean a lot to you, but it is the latest buzzword in cyberspeak. What it stands for is Business to business trade over the Internet. Before the crash of the tech stock NASDEC index earlier this year, investors all wanted a piece of the action, and needless to say, now people are very wary of them.

In a recent article, Jesse Berst of ZD publishing, makes the point that B2B transactions will grow from $336 billion this year to $6.3 trillion by 2005. In addition, the costs of doing business could be reduced by between 2 and 17%, depending on the industry involved.

He goes on to point out that the greatest use of B2B in the future will occur in the following sectors:

I am convinced that there is huge potential for this technology in animal agriculture both for those who deal in commodities and for those selling their own products. We will all be buying and selling over the Internet shortly.

We still have a few copies of Leeson and Summers newest book entitled "Broiler Breeder Production" left. Should you want a copy please let us know?

This is just a reminder that the Fourth International Congress for the Animal Feed Industry will be held at Sun City from 21 – 23 February next year. A good number of respected international speakers will be delivering papers. Should you be interested in attending please contact AFMA at + 27 11 803 3128.

Creating a Demanding Customer

Here is the second part of Mike Statchew of Format International’s article on creating a demanding customer, which in turn builds customer loyalty. Although written with a computer software bias, what is said is of relevance to each and every person involved in the business of selling something.

Educate the Customer! Yes I said educate the customer! A more educated customer is a better customer, and is the worst nightmare for your competition. Now to make sure we are all talking about the same thing, when I say educate, I'm not saying "bash" the competition, I'm saying actually educate the customer... Educate them on what?? Well here's a few items that come to mind:

1. About your product line. Let them know about the total product line, and what it can do for them.
2. About your competitors product line... the more you can show/tell your customer about the competitors product, the more your customers (or prospects for that matter) will come to realize that you know about the products available and why your products are best for them.
3. About the business they are in. it doesn't matter if they are feed millers, feed lot operators, or consulting nutritionists, educating them about the business they are in, and yes how your products can assist them in that line of business will go a long way. For example, on our website (www.formatinternational.com) we now have a section called Scientist to Scientist, which will slowly become a resting place for scientific information about the feed industry, For starters we have been provided some articles on poultry and ratite nutrition, which can be provided to our customers. I would hope that a whole series of articles on nutrition, feeding, distribution, and mill management would be very useful to our existing customers, while also being very useful tools to be used in selling prospects.
4. Educate on the underlying technology utilized in our product line. For example, why is it so important to have our software be based on Windows 98/NT/2000 technology and not MS-Dos based??? Its not that we are "Windows bigots", its that Windows NT and 2000 will have serious problems running MS-Dos based applications, and that even if they do run, they probably will not be able to talk to the printers, LAN drives, and definitely not the Internet for updates and upgrades.... Also, as we progress we all know that integration with the Internet is becoming a business requirement.... MS-Dos doesn’t integrate with the web at all.
5. Educate what we do different than the competition, and make sure the customer knows why.... It is you opportunity to stand out. Educating the customer is one of the re-enforcing methods to make and keep a demanding customer...

Can you imagine your well educated customer interrogating a salesperson from the competition on why they don't have web based support, or why they are continuing to stick to MS-Dos based software, or why all the competitive salesperson knows about your products... is that they exist and not what/how they work???? I surely would not want to be that salesperson!

In closing, educating the customer is a method of reinforcing to the customer why they made the right choice to do business with you....

As always, if you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact me

August saw my family and I in North America. After an overdose of Mickey Mouse we spent 4 days with Nick Dale and his family in their beautiful log home in the forests of Georgia. I was happy to be able to tag along with Nick on his rounds of the University, research facilities and farms.

To say that I was impressed with what I saw would be an understatement. The University of Georgia has a huge Poultry Science department and an equally large Avian Medicine department at the veterinary school. It lies at the centre of the largest concentration of poultry in the USA and funding levels at the University are good.

Although Nick Dale is a Professor in the Department, his role at the University, and indeed the State as a whole is that of extension specialist. He has some post graduate students but is not a "lecturer" in the normal sense of the work. He is however an active research worker. The system as it exists is probably a model of how an extension service should operate in the poultry industry. A high level of technical expertise has been established, research facilities are available to test any new product or solve any problems and the people employed as extension specialists exist for the sole reason of ensuring that the information gets through to the producers.

There were many interesting things that I saw and did whilst with Nick, some of which I will describe below.

Our first visit was to Southern Poultry Research Inc. This research facility is owned by Dr Greg Mathis and is used mostly by pharmaceutical companies to test their drugs for registration purposes. He has a small feed mill and a number of houses in which he does both broiler and turkey work.

We then moved on to the Gainsville GA branch of Cal-Maine foods, who are the largest egg producers in the US. Here we had a meeting with the nutritionist. Apart from being introduced to fried green tomatoes, I found that they are doing pretty much what we are doing in terms of nutrition. It was interesting that he had found that Phytaze had saved him US$ 2.00 per ton, a figure that matches our own savings closely.

The huge number of broilers being slaughtered in Georgia lead to a lot of waste product. Nick took me to visit Ampro Products, Inc who is a specialist rendering company. They produce poultry by-product meals unlike anything we see in our part of the world. Poultry blood, carcasses and feathers all go into separate products. These products are consistent in their nutrient analysis and have amino acid digestibility similar to fishmeal.

The University Research farm is truly impressive. They have a large number of broiler, breeder and layer houses. In addition to a well-equipped feed mill, they also have just completed a modern broiler processing plant, similar to those used in industry.

We moved on from Georgia to Guelph (Ontario) in Canada where we were hosted by Steve and Anne Leeson. They too live in the country and we all thoroughly enjoyed the Canadian woods, bird life and mosquitoes. I was again able to spend some time with Steve both on the University research farm and on a commercial farm.

Although the faculty at Guelph is not quite as big as that of Georgia it is no less impressive and the amount of research being done is truly impressive. I saw everything from trans-genic chickens to feed trials in the University’s controlled environment facilities.

The poultry industry in Canada is probably unique in that production control through a quota or permit system exists. A permit for a single laying hen changes hands at around Canadian $ 100.00 (R500.00) and that for a single broiler place at $40.00.

Producers expect to make in excess of $10.00 per laying hen per year, and one broiler producer we visited was making about 45 Canadian cents profit per kg of broiler sold. I was interested to see three story broiler houses. They are cheaper to build and to keep warm than single story structures.

The layer operation that I visited looked similar to any high rise house in South Africa apart from the fact that the birds that were being used were white egg producers. What I did see that caught my eye was that each fluorescent globe had a transparent, red, plastic sheath around it. The farm manager told us that this had a major influence on calming the birds in the house down.

It was also very interesting to see that the Ontario Department of Agriculture and the University of Guelph work very closely together. The department has its offices on the University campus and the University conducts all agricultural research on behalf of the state. This has lead to the concentration of skills and resources on one site.

We drove from Guelph to Montreal for the WPSA conference. Steve had decided not to attend the PSA meeting as he felt that 6 days of conference was too much at a stretch. It would appear that very few people attended both meetings. Montreal is a beautiful city with a colourful old city on the banks of the St Lawrence River.

The conference venue was excellent and the expo that formed part of the conference was good. Although some of the papers that I attended were good, I felt that too many of the speakers had dusted off some old research and trotted it out for the event. Dr David Sklan presented the one paper that stands out in my mind on the development of the gastro-intestinal tract of the young chick.

Interestingly, the proceedings are all on a CD rather than in book form. The advantage of this is that you can search this database using any number of key words should you need information. The disadvantage is that you can’t really read the paper before the presentation.

I saw a number of very interesting products on display at the expo. The first of these was a system, based on an ion meter, for analysing Calcium, Sodium, Potassium and Chloride. The machinery costs about US$2000.00 and the reagents cost about US 50 cents per sample. Analysis takes about 15 minutes (each sample must be digested). The solutions used do not require any preparation, are non-corrosive and non-hazardous.

The second thing of interest that I found was a product called Soy Chek. By simply adding a small amount of this liquid to a soy sample it is possible to see if it has been adequately processed or not. I have brought some home with me to try out.

Lastly, I was introduced to a product called GroGel which has been designed as a way of preventing the dehydration of day old chicks. In addition it can be used as a vehicle for feeding the USDA approved product called Preempt. Preempt is the first commercially available defined Competitive Exclusion culture. Applied day-of-age to baby chicks, it’s unique blend of 29 beneficial bacteria rapidly colonise the chick’s GI tract, effectively shielding it from Salmonella microbes.

This process, known as Competitive Exclusion, provides the chick with the natural disease resistance of a mature, healthy bird.

A demonstration of Soy Chek’s effectiveness. The sample on the left was adequately cooked while that on the right was raw product.

We returned home with memories of sunny, sometimes very hot days, tremendous hospitality and Pooh bear.

Excerpts from the Journal of Applied Poultry Research

Broken and cracked eggs represent a major economic loss on commercial farms. Approximately 6.5% of all eggs produced are unusable because of shell quality problems. Because most eggs are laid in the morning, and because it takes about 20 hours for the hen to form an eggshell, the hen has a large demand for calcium through the night during the period of shell formation. Previous research has shown that the digestive system of the hen has less total calcium during the early morning than in the late afternoon. Little calcium is available to the hen after midnight when most of the eggshell is being formed. This begged the question; "if we ran the lights and the feeders for 45 minutes at midnight, would the hens consume the feed made available to them and would they produce better quality shells?"

Three separate field experiments using DeKalb and Hy-Line strains were set up. In each experiment, the effect of running the lights and feeders for 45 minutes at midnight in one house was compared to a control house.

A sample of eggs was collected at 900 h and at 1500 h. The specific gravity and shell weight per unit of surface area were calculated as indicators of shell quality. The hens were given midnight feeding for 4 days in a row and eggs were collected daily for the same 4 days over a number of flock ages.

Shell quality was improved by turning on the lights and feeders for 45 minutes at midnight. This was especially effective for eggs collected at 900 h. This would seem logical as the hens who were fed at midnight had a supply of calcium during the time of heavy demand. Hens who lay their eggs later in the day (1500 h collection) have access to calcium for a greater percent of the time during shell formation.

Harms, R.D., et al., (1996): JAPR 5:1-5.

Increased dietary calcium for broiler breeder hens on wire and litter.

It was found that when Broiler Breeders are moved from a floor environment to cages with wire floors that eggshell quality decreased. Increasing the level of dietary calcium from 2.5% to 4.0% with ground limestone or pullet-size limestone did not improve eggshell quality on either surface. This must lead us to question the practice increasing the calcium level in our broiler breeder diets to levels of 3.5% or more.

Estimation of the sodium and chloride requirements for the young broiler chick.

Levels of 0.25% Na and 0.20% Cl were required for maximum 21-day weight by male broiler chicks fed a corn-soybean meal type diet. The requirement for older birds (21 to 42 days) was no more than 0.15% Na. Cl levels higher than 0.2% were of no benefit.

Sodium bicarbonate was equal to sodium chloride as a source of Na, but displayed no production advantages during this study.

Litter moisture was directly related to the Na level of the diet but not to Na source. Maintaining a safe minimum level of Na would be beneficial in reducing problems of wet litter.

Na level and Na source had no apparent effect on tibial dyscondroplasia scores.

Cl, but not Na, appeared to have a strong effect on feed intake. Feed conversion was only weakly affected by levels of Na and Cl, suggesting that the greatest effect of minerals was on appetite.

Increasing Cl tended to improve bone ash, while increasing Na appeared to decrease bone ash.

Within the range tested there were no interactions between Na and Cl on any of the parameters examined. This finding suggests that the application of specific Na: Cl ratios in the formulation of practical poultry diets may not be beneficial.

Seasonal Infertility in Sows

During summer and early autumn, many pork producers experience a variety of reproductive problems. These problems can be anoestrus, extended or no weaning-to-oestrus intervals, poor conception rates, and higher embryo mortality rates (low farrowing rates). This phenomenon is commonly referred to as "seasonal infertility". In boars one will see lower semen output and quality.

This drop in fertility reduces the number of slaughter pigs available during the 2^nd half of the calendar year and constitutes a large reduction in profitability because pork prices are normally higher at that time. Most researchers have attributed this seasonal infertility to two factors—heat stress and the fact that pigs are inherently seasonal breeders. Even though numerous factors may influence sow fertility on a sow farm today, management and environment appear to be the two most influential ones.

Effect of Heat Stress Fertility: In studies where temperatures were elevated experimentally for sows and gilts, anestrus increased while conception rates and embryo survival decreased when temperatures are increased in excess of 28⁰ C. There is also evidence that boars exposed to ambient temperatures in excess of 30⁰ C have lower sperm output and quality. If exposure is short, recovery occurs in 6 to 7 weeks. It takes 6 to 7 weeks for a new group of sperm cells to mature within the boar's testicle and epididymis, and the immature, developing sperm cells tend to be more sensitive than the mature ones.

To determine if pigs are feeling the effect of heat, respiration rate can be monitored when they are in a resting state. Counting the number of times the rib cage moves in and out in a minute can do this. Normal respiration rates for pigs are between 15 and 25 breaths per minute. If respiration rates climb over 60, then the pigs are probably suffering heat stress.

Ventilation and Cooling: The first step in reducing the impact of heat stress on sow fertility is to supply good ventilation. Pigs are more sensitive than humans to the combined effects of heat and relative humidity because they do not sweat. Thus, it is important to consider heat indexes and to adjust the activation temperatures of supplemental cooling systems. It is imperative that supplemental cooling systems are in place in all phases of sow production.

Cooling systems could include evaporative drip or spray cooling and circulating fans. Sprinkling is preferred to fogging, which uses smaller water droplets. Sprinkling cools the skin surface by wetting the skin and allowing the water to evaporate, where fogging cools the air and then the air must cool the skin. Most systems will be designed to operate for a period of 1 to 2 minutes up to 4 times per hour.

Another effective method to cool sows during lactation is the installation of nose coolers. Tubes can be connected to the air inlet and directed to the bottom of the farrowing crate near the sow's nose while she is lying down. This supplies constant air movement across her face when the ventilation system is activated.

Changing Photoperiods: Other research has shown that gradual reductions in day length (photoperiod) may possibly reduce fertility. These studies looked at pigs kept in a constant, thermoneutral environment and measured fertility by farrowing rate and litter size. But the stimulatory influence of photoperiod on sow reproductive performance has not been consistently proven, and most results from these studies suggest that temperature has a greater effect than photoperiod.

Sow Mortality: It is not uncommon for sow mortality to double during the summer months because heat stress is added to the already stressful condition of farrowing and lactation.

In many operations the bulk of sow mortality occurs within the first 30 days following parturition. There are no specific interventions to lower the incidence of mortality during periods of elevated temperatures.

Feeding: Without question, getting sows to keep eating as much as they need or to prevent a drop-off in their consumption during the summer months is the most critical management step for reducing the impact of heat stress on seasonal infertility. Here are some ways to accomplish it:

	Increase Feeding Frequency. When producers switch from feeding two times per day to three times per day, most experience a 10 to 15 percent increase in sow feed intake. The reason this works is related to the normal increase in body temperature that occurs after a sow consumes a meal. More meals are very important for sows whose body temperatures already may be in the upper end of the thermoneutral range.
	Keep Feed Fresh. Sows tend to be picky eaters compared to most animals. In warm conditions, feed is more likely to spoil. Increasing the feeding frequency in conjunction with feeding smaller meals is an excellent way to keep feed fresh.
	Wet Feeding. Success with this strategy may vary greatly among operations, but it has been reported to boost sow feed intake by as much as 15 percent. One drawback is that wet feed does not stay fresh in the trough for very long.
	Adding Fat to the Diet. As a result of poor feed intake, many sows are not able to meet the metabolic demands of lactation and may fall into a negative energy balance. This factor probably accounts for most of the reproductive disorders during periods of elevated temperatures. One way ensure that sows are consuming enough energy, even though they are eating a smaller quantity of feed, is to add fat to the lactation diet.