Swine: tips to reduce nursery feed costs

The increased price for milk and milk products doesn't only affect consumers, but pork producers as well, said a Purdue University expert.

A significant portion of a nursery pig's diet consists of lactose. Last year lactose prices were 30 cents a pound, and now prices have nearly tripled to 85 cents a pound.

"This creates a challenge for swine nutritionists and producers to meet the animal's needs and keep diets economical," said Brian Richert, Purdue Extension swine management specialist. "When a product that makes up 20 percent to 25 percent of a diet nearly triples in price, that increases the cost of raising those nursery pigs substantially."

Richert and other university researchers have been looking at options to reduce the duration and amount of lactose being included to help minimize feed costs.

"The first thing producers can do is look at using a little bit less," Richert said. "If we drop lactose levels by 5 percent in each phase of the diet, we will save $85 a ton, and that is a quick way to start reducing feed costs.

"Next, producers can start feeding a little bit less of those diets. For example, a producer normally feeding 2 to 3 pounds per pig in the first phase of the diet, which typically consists of 20 percent to 25 percent lactose, can decrease that to 1.5 to 2 pounds per pig. Reducing the amount allotted to each pig for the first several dietary phases that contain lactose and lactose sources can help save some on feed costs."

Not only have researchers been looking at reducing lactose, but also at alternatives and replacements.

Dextrose can replace a small amount of the lactose, but not all because certain digestive enzymes are not fully developed in young pigs, he said. Glycerol is another alternative that many researchers are examining.

"Glycerol has a very high digestibility and, to a limit, has very good metabolic function in the pig," Richert said. "We are hoping to replace a portion of lactose with glycerol, which is going to be a less expensive product in the future from a feed grade standpoint as more biodiesel plants start production."

This fall, one of Richert's projects will look at using glycerol with lactose in nursery pigs' diets and testing how far the replacement relationship boundary can be pushed.

"Glycerol is an oily liquid product and when mixed it becomes sticky," Richert said. "But, unlike other oily products, it has unique characteristics in that it seems to soak right into the starch grain portion of the diet, and it flows better than expected."

In addition to glycerol, researchers also are looking into sucrose or starch hydrolysates.

"It gets really hard to take out a lot of lactose in these early diets," Richert said. "It's a dilemma about how much we can replace and still maintain acceptable pig performance."

He said that while replacements may not provide optimal growth performance, such options offer acceptable performance while maintaining a nutritionally sound diet.

"Pigs may be a couple of pounds lighter coming out of the nursery, which may impact the overall performance in grow-to-finish," he said. "It could take a few more days to get them to market weight, but it's the overall costs that we're taking into account - the costs per pound of gain.

"We are just trying to give producers a few options because it doesn't look like the price of dairy products will fall anytime soon. As we go into fall, these prices probably aren't going to change much. But as you look at futures markets going into the fall, hog prices are going to be down. We are going to see income go down, too. So we have to cut costs on the expense side, and 60 percent to 70 percent of all costs in a swine operation are in feed costs."

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Swine: tips to reduce nursery feed costs