Research being conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc will provide an indication of how resources can be used to more efficiently to reduce costs and environmental impacts.
On behalf of Swine Innovation Porc scientists are looking at the resource use of Canadian pork production.
Dr. Mario Tenuta, a professor of applied soil ecology with the University of Manitoba, says the intent is to find ways to reduce the use of resources lowing costs and reducing environmental impact.
Clip-Dr. Mario Tenuta-University of Manitoba:
Everything comes down to dressed carcass weight produced so we'll be using that as the yard stick.
Other indicators for efficiency are the number of animals and the breeding and markets herds that are being produced, feed use, consumption of feed, different types of feed, amounts, the land use to produce that feed, chemical and energy use with the production of the livestock themselves but also for the feed.
Water use in barn and for manure production and, if there was irrigation which we don't have very much in Canada for feed production, manure production, so the volumes of manure but also the nutrients in that manure and then C02 emissions throughout the pig production stages.
That would be for energy use and then for methane emissions through lagoons, ammonia losses, which is an indirect emission of nitrous oxide, nitrous oxide emissions from manure application onto land, really taking a lot of different indicators and those indicators really compared to hot dressed carcass weight.
Dr. Tenuta says that will give us an efficiency of natural resource use directly related to how much pork product is produced.
Source : farmscape