Global Climate Change Drives Need for Rapid Evaluation of Feed Ingredient Quality

An Associate Professor with the University of Guelph suggests, as the impact of global climate change on crop production intensifies, it will become increasingly important to be able to quickly evaluate and change feed ingredients in swine rations.

Researchers with the University of Guelph, working in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc and Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, are exploring various methods to evaluate the protein quality of novel pulses for use in grower finisher pig diets.

Dr. Kate Shoveller, an Associate Professor with the University of Guelph and Champion Petfoods Chair in Nutrition, Physiology and Metabolism, says the goal is to develop methodologies to rapidly identify ingredients with high digestibility and good amino acid profiles for use in diets across the food chain.

Clip-Dr. Kate Shoveller-University of Guelph:

We are most interested in crops that grow well in Canada and then those crops also have to be of high quality. That's the component that the nutrition world would be using to decide whether those different ingredients go into different diets.

You change one ingredient in the swine industry and it changes the ingredient use by all the other industries so there's definitely a cascading effect. Most importantly we are looking to make sure that we provide the swine industry with new high-quality ingredients and that we also supply the nutrition industry with methodologies to more rapidly screen ingredients when we need to replace one with the other.

This is going to become even more important, our ability to switch out ingredients, as global climate change continues to compromise our ability to guarantee ingredients for the nutrition industry.