More in Feed Costs

For the past couple of months, market analysts and a variety of commodity traders have been putting up red flags, warning that excessive volumes of soybeans are being exported, while the short crop of 2012 may have difficulty supplying domestic needs at the end of the marketing year....More

  Lactose is an important ingredient of swine diets – but the source of digestible sugar has become costly in recent years. In research at North Carolina State University presented at the Midwest Animal Science meeting this week in Des Moines, IA, J. Gou explained how chocolate candy can fill in as a source of lactose in weaned pig diets. Gou found that chocolate candy can supply up to 45% of lactose without affecting pig performance....More

  Swine nutritionist Hans Stein of the University of Illinois says canola, cottonseed, and sunflower products can replace soybean meal in swine diets, but they contain less protein and energy. To determine if it makes economic sense to use them, producers need to know the concentrations and digestibility of the nutrients they contain. To help them make the decision, Stein and his team of researchers examined amino acid digestibility for these products....More

Whenever an unsaturated ingredient is added to a swine diet, the potential economic gain must be weighed against the risk of harvesting pigs that have a high iodine value (IV). Understanding how and where iodine value is measured on the carcass can have a significant impact on the IV of your market hogs....More

  The Iowa Pork Producers Association, in association with Iowa State University (ISU) Extension and Outreach, are sponsoring the Iowa Pork Regional Conferences in late February. The sessions, which all run from 1-4:30 p.m., include:...More

  Total variable input costs for the 2013 corn and soybean crops are likely to stay about the same as last year, a Purdue Extension farm business management specialist says. Variable input costs are the costs of production that vary directly with the crop grown, but don't include fixed costs, such as cash rent....More

A Daily Livestock Report reader recently suggested that things must have changed a lot since last summer since hog numbers have not shrunk in the manner that some had warned. While it is understandable why this lack of response might suggest that things must be better, they are not, at least not yet, say Steve Meyer and Len Steiner, authors of the Daily Livestock Report....More

Last week a Missouri ethanol refinery, operated by POET, announced it was suspending production because of the inability to find enough corn. Others may have taken the same action, but the reason may not have been as pronounced. There is no surprise about spot shortages of corn following the drought of 2012, and more will be identified as the marketing year progresses. In fact, the low yields of central Illinois prevented sufficient supplies to larger ethanol plants, which have purchased trainloads of corn from higher-yield areas in Minnesota and the Dakotas....More

A research study conducted at New Fashion Pork in Jackson, MN, tested a new concept of fine-grinding either the corn portion or the whole diet when the diet contained higher levels of by-products in addition to corn to improve the energy value....More

A recent survey by Kansas State University (KSU) has found that despite decades of Extension education emphasizing the importance of feed efficiency in swine, pork industry participants still fall short in knowledge and production applications....More

  The top two factors influencing crop markets in 2013 will be the weather and the potential for a rebound in demand, which diminished last year with drought-driven high prices, Chad Hart told growers at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s (AFBF) 94th Annual Meeting. Still, despite so many uncertainties, prices for corn and soybeans will remain historically high, according to Hart, associate professor and Extension economist at Iowa State University....More