The University of Saskatchewan says the availability of crops this year that normally would not be used as livestock feed will give swine producers a lot of flexibility when formulating rations.
The impact of a cold wet summer on grain and oilseed production was compounded by an August 20th frost that hit southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba.
Cereal crops were particularly hard hit. Prairie Feed Resource Centre Director Vernon Racz says frost damaged oilseeds, like whole-seed canola, can be quite useful in offsetting the low cereal quality in feed.
"Whole-seed canola typically is running at least 40 percent fat or oil. Even if it's frost damaged some sample canolas, we used to see them in at 28, 30, 32 percent fat. That's a lot of extra fat.
Keep in mind that fat contains 2.25 times as much energy per unit as does a unit of starch so, one of making up for the deficiencies of lighter weight grains that may not have the same amount of energy, is to use some of this damaged canola.
We've got a lot of experience from the past from using oilseeds and how to grind them and how to blend them off and so on and its value in these kinds of diets is surprisingly high.
We're no longer limited to just wheat and barley. We've got whole-seed canola, maybe whole-seed flax.
We've got all of these things here to start to pull into these diets that we didn't have in other years simply because they would have been priced way out of reach."
Racz says anything that can be done to salvage some of these damaged grains, and give them a little more value, will be benefit both the grain farmer and the livestock operator.
