You could spend a vast amount of time taking in trade fairs but if you have to make a choice then EuroTier, held every two years in Hannover, Germany is the place to be. EuroTier is arguably the leading global trade fair for animal production. This year there were 163,000 visitors – which included 36,000 from outside Germany – exceeding the record attendance of 2012. Fifty eight countries provided 2629 exhibitors. The number of Chinese exhibitors has increased substantially from 98 in 2012 to 166 this year. Many Chinese companies were selling a multitude of feed ingredients along with a range of pig equipment. With Canada, it was a case of quality not quantity from the 19 Maple Leaf exhibitors.

The event is so massive that buses transport visitors around inside the showground. A few bikes wouldn’t go amiss either. Stands get bigger and bigger each year – no doubt some upmanship involved here – and of course it gets more expensive to build. There’s no such thing as a free lunch and so the bulk of the cost of the stand and the hospitality ends up increasing the price of the company’s products. Cutting the stand size should mean cheaper products plus getting around the show would be much easier and less time consuming. Prairie Hog Country spent three days trekking around the huge halls talking to a great number of companies and it was refreshing that Brexit was only mentioned once, as compared to all the media hype that the British press is currently churning out. The professionals that PHC spoke to were businessmen and women, not politicians, so was this lack of interest a good thing, or just a case of disinterest?

An easy and accurate method of assessing a pig’s pre-slaughter live weight is something the industry craves for. German company Holscher & Leuschner won a gold medal at EuroTier 2012 for their handheld 3D camera scanner and this technology is now available commercially. Another German company, Meier- Brakenberg gained a gold medal at this year’s show (as predicted by PHC) with their Piggy Check, which also assesses the pig’s live weight. Significantly the software can be run on conventional smartphones or tablets with 3D cameras. The software can handle both live and dead-weights so killing out percentage can be calculated. The company plans on a commercial launch by mid-2017, as currently the concept needs some fine tuning. Piggycheck will be available on a monthly subscription basis.

All the major breeding companies have big stands at EuroTier and Jim Long and his Genesus team had a very busy four days promoting Canadian genetics. Genesus is now getting established as big key player in the international seed stock business. Porc-Ex is now marketing Genesus Swine Genetics. Next summer Genesus will invade the UK and put 650 gilts and boars down in England – the importation will be made up of Duroc terminal sires and Yorkshire dam lines. Genesus already has boars in studs in Northern Ireland and now has a 30 per cent share of semen sales in Northern and Southern Ireland. Quebec based Jyga Technologies Inc. are now well known on the world scene. As well as their lactation sow feeder, the company has a novel free access feeder for gestating sows. “We now have 100,000 sows on this system. A feeder takes 18 sows and groups can be as big as 100 plus no special gilt training needed. Furthermore, the system is wireless so no cables needed,” commented Gratien Theriault, Jyga’s exports manager. Cost is $2500 (US) per station.

Handling dead sows and boars is a pretty tough job, especially for sows that die in farrowing crates. Again technology has come to the rescue and Holscher & Leuschner were exhibiting their Porky’s Pickup XL, which is a self-propelled trolley that can handle carcases up to 300kg and is operated by one person. Cost is $6,449.88.

Welfare is never out of the news these days. The Danes have been having trouble with shoulder sores on their sows and even a type of sticking plaster has been used to treat this problem. ACO-Funki’s solution to this has been to produce their polymer concrete 60cm x40cm Comfort Plate which can be fitted into existing farrowing crates, under the sow’s shoulders. Their new farrowing crates, however, have cast iron panels which the sow lies on. ACO-Funki sells a crate-less farrowing pen and at weaning the sow is removed, with the piglets remaining to 30kg. Removing the stress of mixing and moving gives a 50gm / pig benefit in weight gain. To cater for this concept, ACO-Funki has designed their Combi-feeder, which initially the sow feeds from and later feeds the weaners by moving an above trough pendulum, which releases feed into the trough.

Free farrowing seems to be in vogue at the moment, with Denmark linking this concept with a new high welfare programme. All the major equipment manufacturers were displaying large farrowing pens with crates that can open out 3-4 days post farrowing. This allows the piglet’s time to gain strength and not get overlaid. Some pens have no restraints at all. Restraint-free farrowing might be welfare friendly for the sow but what about her tiny offspring? Can we justify 16 per cent pre-weaning mortality when the world is short of pig meat? Nothing is new though in pig farming – we had these “new-fangled farrowing pens” in GB – back in the 1960s!

There were many toys on display, chains, balls and the like, plus a number of different straw racks/hoppers, again to meet the many welfare codes now in existence.

Devenish is a Belfast, N.Ireland based company which has grown enormously of late, to the extent that this year they won the Queen’s award for International Trade. Devenish used the show to launch its new product, Nurturaid ™. Nurturaid is a palatable treat-sized ball with a milk flavour based coating, containing proven nutritional products which piglets will preferentially seek out in preference to the regular creep. Feeding Nurturaid from four to 28 days (weaning) improved weaning weights and post weaning performance. Nurturaid costs $5.75 / kg; a litter consumes 1.5kg so costs / litter = $8.62. Devenish claims feeding Nurturaid gives a 10:1 return on investment, based on lifetime performance.

Feed is still the major cost of producing pig meat. Mycotoxins were scarcely known about 30 years ago, probably apart from ergot in rye, but today we are well aware of their effects on production and there are many, many toxin binders on the market. Mycotoxins levels vary with the season and region so a blanket dose rate of a binder can be quite inaccurate. Consequently French company Olmix has developed their online Myco’Calculator. Producers simply specify the species, give details of the mycotoxin analysis and the programme then calculates the required amount of toxin binder (MT.X + or MMi.S) that should be added to the feed. AMR is a hot topic at the moment and Olmix is focussing a great deal of resources in relation to using algae as an alternative to antibiotics and at EuroTier visitors were invited to the Olmix stand to sample chicken reared without antibiotics.

The next EuroTier takes place November 13-16, 2018 and the hotels are already taking bookings. •

— By Norman Crabtree