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Nanoparticles Being Used to Protect Vaccine and Sperm During Intrauterine Vaccination

Researchers with the University of Saskatchewan are exploring the potential value of nanoparticles to protect and enhance the effectiveness of vaccines administered with sperm during artificial insemination.

The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization and the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition at the University of Saskatchewan are evaluating the use of nanoparticles to protect fertility and maintain the effectiveness of intrauterine vaccines administered to sows and gilts during AI.

Ramin Mohammadi, a Ph.D. candidate and a member of the Drug Discovery and Development Research Group in the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, explains, the goal is to mitigate degradation of the vaccine, enhance its effectiveness and protect the sperm by encapsulating the vaccine along with oil and water adjuvants.

Clip-Ramin Mohammadi-University of Saskatchewan:

Nanoparticles are going to encapsulate the oil and water adjuvants so it's not going to be spermicidal.We've done several trials with the nanoparticles and right now we are playing around with trying to use different techniques to incorporate different flavours of oil and water adjuvants into the nanoparticles.
Each of them have their own specific chemistry so figuring out how to get the adjuvants inside that nanoparticle with the other parts of the vaccine, it's really key.

We've had some very exciting success so far, but there are still others that we're in the process of testing.We would like to do a full panel of these nanoparticles, select all the best ones with the best response and then start moving into challenge studies which is kind of at the next level.

Mohammadi says preliminary results are showing passively that a single administration of the vaccine delivered with the oil and water adjuvants is possibly more effective than two vaccinations where the adjuvants are not included, suggesting this might lead to a single dose vaccine.

Source : Farmscape.ca

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Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.