Best Deadstock Removal Options Depend on Individual Farming Situations

Dec 05, 2022

When managing deadstock, pork producers are encouraged to consider their own location, management and biosecurity situations when deciding on the best option.

Prior to 2002 rendering plants would pick up deadstock because it had value but when BSE hit and the material became unusable removal became a cost.

"Alternative Methods for Deadstock Management" was among the topics discussed earlier this month as part of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2022 in Saskatoon.

Dr. Terry Fonstad, the Associate Vice-President Research with the University of Saskatchewan, says the most appropriate choice depends on such factors where you are, how far you are from services, the geology of the site and what kind of operation it is.

Clip-Dr. Terry Fonstad-University of Saskatchewan:

If you're going to handle them yourself, so if you’re going to deal with them on farm you can try to bury them, you can incinerate them, you can compost them.If you're going to bury, the big consideration is the geology, the fluid conductivity of the soil.The permeability of the soil is the big one.

If it's low enough and water can't flow through the pores, you don't really have a problem but if water can flow through the pores and you've got any kind of ground water anywhere near then you're not going to want to use burial.

The strength if the liquid that results and the amount of it is actually about four times that of manure so you want to make sure your geology if you're going to try to bury them is such that you're not going to get transport.
If you're going to consider composting, then you're going to need a carbon source.

You need wood chips or you need straw and then you need someone nearby that's going to take the compost.
If you're going to burn them, you could build an incinerator but then there are quite tight restrictions on particulate matter to actually reach to meet these requirements.

Dr. Fonstad says, depending on your management practices, your biosecurity and where you are, there are solutions out there.

He says everybody is going to have their own situation so it's important to crunch the numbers.

Source : Farmscape.ca

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.