By Casey Neill, Pipestone
Everyone likes a deal! Who doesn’t? If there is an opportunity to buy something at a “good” price, most people jump at the opportunity. But sometimes the deal isn’t as good as what we thought and we don’t figure that out until after the fact. The same thing can happen with nutrition or diet formulation.
One of the responsibilities of a swine nutritionist is to formulate diets that can reduce cost and provide adequate performance for the producer. There are many times opportunities come up that allow nutritionists and producers to re-formulate and save money. But saving money sometimes just shows up on paper and is never realized at the barn level or the close-out.
Why is that? When we think we are going to save money, sometimes it never happens because we have gone too cheap and the diet fails. We consider average daily gain (ADG) and feed:gain (FG), but seldom consider the number of fall behinds, culls and medication costs that can occur.
Our nutrition advisory panel continues to remind us that the most important diet in a pig’s life is phase one, the second is phase two and the third is lactation. Providing a good start for the baby pig and weaned pig will help them finish ahead of the curve. But trying to cut cost to save money may not always be the best option, and we need to understand the negative effects.
Here are a few examples of when going cheap fails.
Weaning Older Pigs
Cheap Option: Weaning older pigs gives an opportunity to reduce the phase one nursery feed budget. What a great idea! The phase one diet costs the most on a per-ton basis, so let’s skip it or reduce it.
Result: Pipestone conducted two research trials that showed feeding older, heavier weaned pigs a lower amount of phase one or skipping phase one completely did not save money due to lower performance and increased mortality.
Nursery Programs
Cheap Option: Looking at nursery feed cost on a per-ton basis when evaluating nursery programs. Mainly from habit, it is easy to look at cost per ton and go with the cheaper option. However, assuming performance will be equal is not correct.
Result: Below is another one of our research trials that demonstrates the difference between our program to another nursery program that appears to be cheaper on paper. However, the pigs told us a different story.
Margin over Feed Cost
Cheap Option: Most producers are on a wean pig wheel schedule, meaning they have a fixed time to get their market hogs to the appropriate market weight before their next group of weaned pigs show up. The urge to feed cheap diets to save a buck is very tempting in the grow-finish stage.
Result: Pipestone conducted another competitor trial looking at a cheaper feed cost program compared to our nutrition program. In this trial, feeding cheaper diets did not allow the pigs to grow and caused a higher amount of culls reducing revenue. This is one reason we like to look at margin over feed cost. Not only does it account for the feed cost, but also the revenue that is generated.
These are only a few examples of how cheap diets fail. We are always looking at ways to reduce cost, but keep in mind that sometimes going too far will actually cost the producer money. Don’t trip over a dollar to pick up a dime.
Graph Source: Casey Neill, Pipestone
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