It is a particular honour for Mark and myself this afternoon to present on a topic that's close to our hearts, which is reducing the cost of production and particularly looking at the cost of feed waste in in pig production. Food accounts for the bulk of the cost of production, some 65% of the cost of production is related to the food. The other costs would be related to genetics around 6%, the health bill at around 4 and 5%, and the labour bill, which will be around about 12 to 14%.

Other costs such as water and electricity, and bedding, and rates all account for the remaining amount of costs. But it is the margin over feed, which often relates to the profitability of the farm. So when the food prices go up too high, then the cost of production becomes extremely hard.

We have our food comes in two forms. One is an energy source, which is rather simplistic, but an energy source from the corn, wheat and barley, and a protein source from soya, or and I work in Australia from plants like lupins. And all of this goes into producing excellent quality British pork, which has to be at the right price so that the consumer can pay for it.

Unfortunately, what has been happening is that the price of food has gone up, but the price of the slaughterhouse payments have come down, and so therefore the profitability of the pig industry has waned. We have competition over buying our food for the pig industry. So if we take corn, for example, we have other animals that eat corn.

We have human beings that eat corn, and we have ethanol, so we can put the corn into our fuel. And so all of these things drive the cost of fuel, cost of corn up for the pig farmer. So if we look at food and food costs, and what can we do in order to reduce the cost of food.

Well, the first thing about food is, is also about the security of the food. We must ensure that we do not introduce African swine fever, through our feed. And we have to make sure that we manage our feed, to maximise the biosecurity on the farm.

And in this, top video, we see what is quite common, particularly in Asia, where corn or soya is dried on the road. And therefore, therefore, there's a risk, a small risk of, contamination with African swine fever. Here we have a farm, actually in Russia, and now in order to reduce the transportation of goods onto the farm itself, the food is delivered to bolt tanks on the perimeter of the main farm, and then it is transshipped from these bolt tanks to the farm buildings themselves.

This top video illustrates how it's important to ensure that people working in feed mills also understand the concept of biosecurity. If this lady's shoes were the same shoes she wore on her grandfather's farm yesterday, who happened to have African swine fever, then in milling this food, there's a potential for her to move the virus into the feed. And so now, we insist on a separate clothing and separate coloured shoes, and including brushes and things on our feed mills.

So that we ensure that the food that we are providing the pigs is as clean as possible. And there has to be no swill feeding. It is illegal within the United Kingdom anyway, but it doesn't mean that we as veterinarians cannot keep promoting this.

We have to be worried about our pet pig people who may be tempted to swill feed. These are pigs actually in Africa, and we had swill feeding here, but, we never had African swine fever in these pigs because we cooked the food. But that unfortunately was not true for other villages.

It is the major reason why the Philippines broke with African swine fever, because they swill fed restaurant wastes, and unfortunately they were not cooked. And while ship garbage is not specifically swell as such, but the ship's ship garbage in 2007 is the cause of this original outbreak of African swine fever type 2, which is now causing devastation to the world's protein supply. And just as an illustration of African swine fever, one of the symptoms of African swine fever is the sow will not eat.

Certainly, there can be more dramatic signs. This sow also had a temperature of 42 °C. There's some blotching of her skin, but this unfortunate sow is haemorrhaging, from every orifice on her body and is extremely ill.

Both of these pigs, died later this same day. But we can have other things in the food that is uner warranted or unrequired. And in this particular case, what we have is vomitoxin and we have a microtoxin and the sows are vomiting and extremely sick and did not want to eat.

Here we see some gossipol which is a contaminant from cattle production and and the cattle feed was being contaminated. The next load of feed which was from pigs. And the top picture has ergot.

And this particular example from the UK there was actually so much ergot, the ergot was worth more than the, than the wheat. And we actually sold the crop for ergot, rather than wheat. We must remember a little bit about microtoxins, and it's, I don't wanna talk about microtoxins specifically, just that some of the microtoxins, the S refers to microtoxins that develop in the feed bin.

In storage, whereas the other microtoxins come from the field. So clearly, we can test for the field toxins before they come to the farm. But the storage microtoxins, we have to manage by managing our feed bins.

And so the first part of feed wastage has to be to look at the feed bin and feed manufacturing system itself. And here we see an on-farm feed, production system in Canada. And we have to be, first off, careful about how much waste we have here, how much dust is being produced, how much, what percentage of feed is being lost, right from the word go, in the production system.

One of the main ways of losing the quality of feed is how we're manufacturing the food. And in this particular case in the Ukraine, we have some very poorly maintained hammers and therefore the food grind was inappropriate, leading to more ulcers, but also leading to whole grain coming through the food. Pigs do not digest whole grain, and in this particular case we had 5% whole grain, going through the food.

That food is just wasted. It goes down through the slots into the slurry and back onto the field. And it was associated with the poor maintenance of these hammers.

We then deliver the food to the farm. It's very important to we put the food in the feed bin. And then, and when we take the food out of the feed bin, we don't cause big piles of food.

This has multiple problems with it. If we have wasted food like this, which is extremely common on farms, then we will encourage wild animals, particularly pigs, who could come to our farm and then increase our risk of African swine fever. This particular case here was in Iowa, where what had happened was that there had been no food and the feed had not been delivered at all.

It's extremely cold, down to -25, -30, and the pigs had actually started to eat the snow in desperation and had given themselves gangrene of the stomach, clostridium shovinate, associated with the frostbite that the eating the snow gave them. We have the food distributed around the farm, and we must make sure that we're not throwing food away. This example is in China, and we see that the guys are.

Putting the food around the farm in the, in a wagon, but they're not putting the food into the wagon half the time, they're wasting way too much food, and as veterinarians, I encourage us to examine the feed, distribution, examine the feed bins, and in particular, make sure that the feed bins are all numbered. Very important to ensure that the feed bins are numbered, and then as the next slide will show, and we can medicate the right feed, but also the right food is in the right feed bin. We need to ensure that the feed bins are managed properly and there are increasing amounts of technology where the feed bins are weighed, and you can remotely calculate how much food is in the bin.

Feed must not run out, but also we don't need to feed to be overfilled. We don't need the feed to not go into the right feeder. Here we see in Australia, a typical fielded wagon, this is a a road train, with only 3 wagons on it, .

And it's essential when these guys turn up that they know which bin to put the feed into. And we don't end up with medicated feed in the wrong bin, or even just the wrong food in the wrong bin, cos all of this adds to waste. Something that's often forgotten is that medicated food particularly has temperature requirements.

And so this antibiotic should be kept below 25. Difficult in the summertime to keep our feetments below 25, . A more practical problem is in the nursery.

The nursery's run at around 30 °C, so you can't keep your nursery feed in the, in the nursery, just because it's convenient and it's easy for me to fill the nursery feeds. But when the feed, when the room is running at 30 °C, this high milk product will go off. It'll go sour.

And then we wonder why the pigs aren't eating properly, and pigs don't like eating the food. Well you need to maybe taste it yourself and then obviously watching health and safety, but in truth, if you don't want to eat the food, why should the pigs? The feed is set up, you know, is there enough feed space for the pigs?

How are the pigs getting access to the food? How are you, how often are you feeding the pigs? These pigs are being fed ad lib, so the food is supposed to be there all the time.

There's clearly something wrong with their behaviour, implying that the pigs are clearly hungry, and we'll come back to this. Liquid feeder is extremely nice way of feeding pigs. Here we see the pigs are waiting for the food.

And here we see the pigs are now being fed. And with a liquid feed system, particularly where there is enough feed space for every pig to eat with a long trough, there are some systems now where they are trying to use short troughs, which I find a little more difficult. I much prefer the long trough system.

But here we see pigs in a, in a long trough, pigs are all lined up to eat. Why is this one not eating? What is going on with these three?

I mean, it's such a very good system to, for the clinician, for the stock person working on the farm, so we can identify animals that need a little bit of extra help. Then we got the other scenario where there's like chaos. And here in this farmer in Canada, there would be a a problem with the feed line.

The line had broken, and therefore, there'd be no food. There'd be no food for 6 hours. And so when the feed did come on, pigs love food.

When the food did come on, the pigs went crazy for the food, leading to bullying, leading to stress levels, leading to some pigs who just sort of give up, miss a day's food. And it's actually sad that there's been a number of research projects and over. Many farms.

Many, many farms miss feed events. There's many farms where, because of various reasons, feeders get blocked, feed lines get blocked, feed lines get broken, but many farms, many batches of pigs, you cannot guarantee that pigs will get fed every day. This is a major problem for the industry.

How is the food being distributed around the farm? Here we see there's food in this part of the feed trough, but no food in this part because this downpipe is blocked. And therefore, the the amount of feed space available is much reduced.

Here we see the same thing, but this time it's associated with faeces that has got into the trough and has blocked the trough. And so the trough only has half the feed spaces available. Increasing the aggression, decreasing the growth rate, increasing the variability within the within the group.

This particular feed trough here, feeder here, the problem is that I can't see it. I can't see what's going on at the feed space, at the feeder face. The feeder needs to be turned round.

On several of my farms now, we actually put video cameras up, webcams, so we can actually watch the feed. So that we can actually monitor. Food is that expensive, we cannot afford to waste it this way.

Where is the food and the water position? You really want the food and the water to be within 2 metres of each other. If it's over 2 metres, then what happens is pigs will walk.

So pigs go from this feeder, then they walk over to this drinker with food in their mouth. And 15 grammes of food is wasted. 15 grammes, not very much.

3 teaspoons. You have 1000 pigs. It's a lot of food that can just get wasted and dropped onto the floor because the pig is having to walk to the water, because pigs like to eat and drink approximately the same time.

It's very, very common not to cover foetus. 10, 15% of the dust in the room comes into that room from the time when the feeders are filled. So you can make an impact on the respiratory health of the pigs by reducing the amount of dust.

15 to 20%, 1010 to 15% of the dust in the room occurs when you're feeding. Well, that is also food that is not available to the pigs. Strongly recommend that we cover foetus.

So that you and you can monitor the feed usage by looking in the trough. You don't have to see it at the top. In this particular farm here, we had a chronic salmonella problem.

Chronic diarrhoea in growers. We covered the foetus, the diarrhoea stopped because what was happening was that the birds were defecating into the foetus, contaminating the food, giving the pigs salmonellosis, chronic salmonosis. We had no real clinical signs apart from diarrhoea.

Nobody died. But we lost food conversion and the pigs were unhappy. From a monitoring point of view, one of the nice things about batching, and being disciplined in the pig farm is that we can monitor the amount of food being used at these different stages.

If, for instance, there is 5% of the food is creep feed. It's a major problem. Because this will seriously dest destabilise the cost of feed.

We're feeding too much food at the beginning. It began the whole system very expensive. The pigs will love it.

But It makes the food very expensive, makes the cost of production very expensive. So one of the ways to look at particularly the cost of baby pig feeds is to look at your creep feed management. Why are you creep feeding before 14 days, for example?

Are you absolutely sure you're getting your your value for money? This sow does not need this much food. And why was more food added?

This is a manually fed forward feed trough to a lactating sow. What is the guy thinking? Just tips in another 5 kg of food on top of the previous 1015 kg of food without asking the question, why?

And here, we see in a breeding store food they feed the pigs in the morning in order to encourage them to come in, but. Why is the food on the floor? This is a disaster.

When you open that door, there is food everywhere, because what had happened was that the feed line had broken. This is a particular case when I was 15, and we ended up with 30 tonnes of food in the finisher house, and it was an important lesson for me to learn as I had to dig out the slurry pits, of the food. At least I didn't have to pay for it, but the farmer had to pay for it.

Here in the Philippines, we have food that's wasted at the end of a feed trough for gesting sows. Feed wasted on the floor. Why is there food on the floor?

Cannot afford to floor feed these days. Here we see food that is wasted on this half of the house, and we'll come back to this as well again, because there is either not enough pigs or maybe no pigs in this side of the feeder. There's pigs in the other, the feeders are feeding this side of the pen, but all the excess, all the food on this side has not been eaten by pigs.

This is poorly poor management. This is a typical nursery. On a Friday.

Because on a Friday, the feeders are topped up full so that nobody has to go in on Saturday and Sunday in and feed the pigs. That's great as long as the food is actually in the hoppers, and not some of these will be the over overfilled. As in this case Here we go on Friday.

And unfortunately, there's food all over the floor. Because the stop people have filled a feeder but missed and ended up putting the food on the floor, complete waste. It is not unusual for pig farms to waste 10 to 15% of their feed.

The health bill can be 5%, 434, 5%, depending on on the health of the pigs. But that the wasted food can be 2 to 3 times more than the vet bill. So a major contribution to the cost of production.

One of the things that completely baffles me are holes, how we can have holes. In a feeder that that controls 65% of the costs, we have holes. We have holes in production in in our feeders.

Not only could this runs the risk of damaging the pig's mouth, but the food is wasted. We have feed through the slats. We have a downpipe here and the food is pumped out of the downpipe.

Poor maintenance. In this feather here in Australia. It's an outside feeder, but there's holes.

Ho So food is falling through the feeder onto the floor, just being wasted. I would encourage that we take photographs of all the feeders on the farm and and the entrance door to each building. We specify exactly how we want those feeders to be running.

Goldilocks concept. Too little food, too much food, ideal food. I want around 75% of the pan to be visible.

Pigs need to work for their food. There's too much food, they'll just waste it, and there's too little food, then they won't grow. With every one of your feeders in your client's farms, you should photograph them and then have a poster hanging up outside the door saying to the stock person exactly how you want the feeders to be running.

In this nursery here, it's too much fruit. Too much food is available, feed is being wasted. The feeder is on slats.

So any food that is wasted will go straight through the slits into the slurry pit. The only thing it does in there is feed the flies. Even with outdoor production, we've still got to be very careful about the size of our nuts and how we feed our pigs to ensure that we do not waste feed.

And we've already talked a bit about wet feeding systems, but watch the pigs that they're feeding, when you're walking around the farm, watch how the pigs are using the feeders. Watch how the pigs are using the drinkers. Watch how the pigs are sleeping.

Where they're defecating. Behaviour is a very important signer of normality or stress. Feet is over full.

There's one thing having a slight amount of feed, but these feeders are just grossly over full. Too much food, too much food, too much food. All of this is just wasted.

Wasted food on the floor. Wasted food on the floor. With a liquid feed system.

Assuming you have a long trough, and all the pigs eat at the same time, there should be no food available after about 20 minutes. The pigs will be fed 6 to 10 times a day, depending on the system, but there should be no fruit. So when you come in an hour or so after feeding and the troughs are this full, there's too much food being provided.

And all the pigs will do is they will hike the feed out or they will defecate into the feed, but whatever they do, they will waste the food. All this food on the floor is just wasted. Why, why would you go and eat food that's on the floor when you can eat it, eat it fresh out of the hopper?

On the other hand, we've got to feed them. Here we see a lactating sow, day 5 of lactation, no food. Lactating sows should almost always have food in front of it.

If you want to maximise milk yield and and piglet weaning weights, we need to feed the sows. We can't have them looking for food. This feed trough is not only clean, it's licked clean.

Her behaviour is indicating that she's hungry, and we need to see that and feed her. One of the reasons why food can flow too fast is the quality of the food is is wrong. And here we see a Bro feed sieve, where you put the feed in and you give it a shake and at each one of these points, there's a different sieve, different size sieve, and so it tells you how much dust you have versus how much whole grain.

And this particular picture you see that there's an awful lot of dust. And what the pigs are doing is they're moving their heads, they're hiking the feet out because they're looking for the, the tasty bits of the food. And so we have here more normal food, and here we have a lot of dust in the feet.

The more small particles, the more small dust, then the more gastric ulcers you're gonna have. When you have combined water feed troughs, you've gotta make, you've gotta manage the whole system well as well, because if the water system overflows into the feeders, then again, you're gonna have feed wastage, with just too much water, the pigs are splashing the water around, throwing the water around and throwing the feed around. And you can clearly see the food that's through the slats.

Totally unacceptable. And these pigs are looking for food. But the food is blocked because of the water.

Outdoor pig production can be just the same. Pigs, lying on, on food in the floor, unacceptable. Here we have water leaking onto a feeder and the food is going mouldy.

It's unfortunately not uncommon, that when you examine feed, you might find that it is moving. And in this particular case, this is a a firing house and the sow's not eating very well, and this was the food that was being offered her. And you can clearly see that there are maggots.

And what you can then do is you can do your Sherlock Holmes, and you can look at the length of the maggots, and then determine how many days. That food has not been managed. This particular farmer told me that it was fine that morning.

It's clearly not correct. These maggots are at least 5 or 6 days old. Now food is at least 5 or 6 days old.

Plus the fact that it smelt rancid as well. Leads to vermin and rodent control. We've got to we've got to protect our food supplies from, birds, outdoor systems, you know, one seagull can eat 100 grammes a day, a lot of seagulls, around the east coast, around East Yorkshire.

We've seen this picture before where we covered the feeders and reduced salmonella outbreak. You can clearly see, bird contamination on these feeders, and this is a fairly typical picture of East Yorkshire, in the spring. You know, each rat eats 15 grammes a day, you know a lot of rats on the farm, a lot of tonnage per year that is just going to waste.

The presence of rats may not be that difficult to see, you might not see the rat, but you can see the faeces where the rat has been. And where some birds have been in in the in the pen. This is an empty pen, but it doesn't mean that that just because it's an empty pen, it means that the pens next door may well also have the same rod in contamination.

One of the problems as being a veterinarian is we need to encourage our clients to not feed pigs that are. Sick And we all, and we need to make sure our medication is effective. In this particular case we have a rectal stricture.

This starts off with a rectal prolapse, for many reasons. One is piling in the winter time, coughing too much, but the, anal ring rectum comes out and the pig gets bitten or damaged on the rectum, and then you end up with this rectal prolapse. This pig will continue to eat, but it has extreme constipation, and eventually will die.

But in the meantime, it will, as it continues to eat. It will be consuming food. We have to control problems like ileitis.

We've got to eliminate problems like swine dysentery and brachysbi dysenteri. Iliitis islosonium into cellularis. Lawsonia into cellularis creates poor waste, wastage of pigs, in the sense that they don't grow well, they have ill thrift, and so they still eat, but they, have a, a chronic diarrhoea, and we must, and do what we can to eliminate chronic diseases.

And then we have feed related problems such as gastric ulcers. This is a particularly severe case where we have a hemorrhagic ulcer, you can see the black haemorrhage in the stomach, . These pigs die fairly quickly, but a very chronic ulcer is like a dripping tap where the pig is just bleeding into the intestinal tract, and that is all again food that is just being wasted.

You can see the stomach here full of fluid, which you can see is black. And then when you open up the stomach, you can reveal the severe hemorrhagic gastric ulcer. Hospital pens need to be properly managed.

In this particular case we have a lame pig, put it in the pen next door to the normal pigs. Personally, that's not terribly adequate. I don't like laying pigs on slatted floors in the first place.

You put the pig on its own, which is fine, but I, I would put it into a, into a, into a bedded pen. But putting it on its own, on a, in a feeder that's designed for 30 pigs means that you just end up with feed wastage, because the pig cannot manage the feeder in order to make the feeding running efficiently. What do we do with very small piglets at birth?

Do we keep those pigs going and let them die before weaning or all those pigs that we save at birth, if you are fairly sure it's not going to get to finish, then the question really should be, should you be euthanizing those pigs? And again, save the feed costs. If you have an open pen, particularly with a a floor, waste of soil and and straw, then if you don't manage the straw, then it can get very difficult to walk.

And as it's difficult to walk, that all increases the feed costs. How we're managing our cull programme, how we're feeding our guilts, what food we're feeding our guilts, and many sows are grossly overweight in gestation. One of the problems with being grossly overweight in gestation is you can't fit into the firing crate, and that then increases your culling problem or culling rate because you have to remove these sows from the system because they can't fit into the system.

Totally unacceptable. I joke about the fact it's good to feed pigs. This AI stud, we have food in the feeders, but no bore.

Well, how many days does it take for the guys to realise that the pig has moved? Here we have a similar situation that we had before, where we have a feeder that effectively feeds 2 pens. This pen has no pigs in it.

And so this pan here, or these Duros here eating out of this feeder, this other, the other side of the feeder is still feeding. And the food is then being wasted. This is a particular bugbear of mine.

And where we here, we see here that we've taken the pigs out and we're ready to clean. His feeders are still full of food. And the, the, the stockman.

In this particular house, the what the stockman did, he used to put the pressure washer in to empty the feeder. You must make sure these feeders are empty of food before you start cleaning. Get the pigs to eat the food out, hand feed by by a bag if necessary.

But you cannot just put the pressure washer into the feeder and then spray the feed down the slats and then wonder why you have a fly problem. And then finally, Use the right bore. You need to understand the whole concept of feeding pigs.

You need to make sure that we're using the right bore to ensure that we get the right food conversion ratio. We produce the right quality carcass for the slaughterhouse. For example, if we use a bore that reduced the food conversion by 0.1, we reduce the feed intake by 10 kg, for a 300 kg pig.

This can be reduced obviously the costs, it can reduce the carbon footprint of the pig and can create more profit if profit is available in pig production. So, in summary, Reducing the feed waste helps us reduce the waste and keep our clients. In business.

And improve our biosecurity at the same time. Thank you very much indeed.