Speaking at the Manitoba Swine Seminar in Winnipeg, MB recently Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a Professor and Air Quality Specialist with the Department of Animal Science at the University of California-Davis says the persistent red barn image of agriculture is misleading the public and needs dispelling if modern agriculture is to be free to meet the challenge of feeding the world.

In only 40 years, the world’s population doubled and people say the world’s population could increase by another 50 per cent over the next 40 years.

No wonder, HyLife founded in1994 as a joint venture and has quickly grown to become Canada’s leading pork producer, producing 1.69 million hogs annually in Canada and the United States wants to spend $120 million to expand the Neepawa pork processing plant, build a number of hog barns, and a feed mill or two to meet the climbing demand for the company’s product in Japan and China. Without that expansion, the company will not be able to supply the current demand, let alone the demand from an expanding population.

Dr. Mitloehner says to feed that growing population, agriculture must become and be allowed to become as efficient as possible. “I think we are on the right track with respect to how we produce livestock today but we’re not on the right track on how we communicate as to how we do it and why,” he said. “One of the stories that you hear out there is that in the 1950s and 1960s we had a much better agricultural production then. Everything was greener and therefore less environmentally harmful. The opposite is true.”

Dr. Mitloehner says farmers then needed way more, three to four times more, animals to produce the same amount of food under conditions that were not welfare enhancing. “We had to tie animals onto equipment. We had to hand milk or hand raise animals. We had to, or we did put manure straight into the next stream to get rid of it. All of these things are unthinkable today,” he said. “We are a much more sustainable animal agriculture today than we were in the 1950s and 1960s but this red barn idyllic picture is in the heads of people. They think that’s what they want but I don’t think they know what that entails.”

Dr. Mitloehner says the animal agriculture field needs to step out of their cave and really engage with the public who increasingly often want to know how farmers produce animal protein and why. There’s nothing to be hidden, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, people are proud and they should be but in order to stay in business they need to tell their story.

At the same conference, Dr. Candido Pomar, a Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada says, as the human demand for protein grows, it will become increasingly important for livestock producers to make more efficient use of the nutrients fed to livestock.

As part of research being conducted in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc, scientists are developing precision feeding strategies designed to provide each pig with the exact amount of nutrients necessary to optimize growth.

Dr. Pomar says by tailoring rations to meet the specific nutritional needs of each pig, farmers will be able to reduce the total amount of nutrients provided to the herd by about 25 per cent.

“We are expecting, in the coming years, that we are going to be competing with human nutrition because the human population is growing more and more and also meat consumption is growing, particularly driven by China,” he said. “China’s consumption per capita is increasing very fast so it is not going to be too long that available protein has to be used for humans and animals so improving the efficiency is an essential element because otherwise we are going to be in competition with human nutrition and we cannot be there.”

Dr. Pomar says, by tailoring the nutritional content of rations to provide each pig with exactly what it needs to maximize growth, farmers will be able to cut production costs while also reducing a number of nutrients excreted into the environment. •

— By Harry Siemens