Agriculture Business Week

There is a saying, “when a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, a tsunami may occur in another place.” This is obviously an exaggeration, but the point is that small things can have great effects. This is the essence of the “tipping point.” The concept of tipping points has major impact on understanding swine health and production.

Although its principles are clear, a disease-control program including biosecurity doesn’t always work for all farms. No single “recipe-style” program will always work under all situations in any pig farm. Each farm is on its own “unique” situation that sets it apart from other farms. A disease may strike separate herds but the approach to its control differs from farm to farm.

This is because the combinations of risk factors leading to “explosion” of disease are not the same for all farms. When a disease breaks out in a herd, it indicates that risk factors have crossed the “tipping point” for that disease.

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Posted on October 14th, 2012 under Livestock. Tags: Pig. Comments: None

Unknown to many, the biggest commercial swine farm in the Ilocos Region and probably one of the biggest in the country is in Barangay Bugayong, Binalonan, Pangasinan, which is located parallel to the national highway.

The DCU Farm started on a rented land 23 years ago with five weanlings, which were raised for fattening. Today, it is already at the 1,000-sow level in a sprawling contiguous area and has been incorporated as the DCU Farm Corporation.

Equally astonishing is that the owner, Danilo “Danny” C. Uy, is a high school dropout who established the small piggery because his neighbors were quarreling over the waste generated by a small kropek factory he established about a year earlier.

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Posted on August 16th, 2012 under Livestock. Tags: Hog, Pig, Swine. Comments: 6

With good early bookings, all the signs are that there will be another well attended Pig, Poultry & Dairy Focus Asia 2010. This event is now perceived as Asia ’s leading independent technical conference for anyone involved in modern pig, poultry and dairy production and attracts production managers, QA managers, nutritionists and veterinarians. The event will be held on 1 – 3rd March 2010 at the prestigious Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.

The event has 90 international experts as its speakers and topical issues such as the use of enzymes and probiotics to improve feed utilisation and animal performance, the effect of health on meat or milk quality, controlling the impact of mycotoxins, optimising reproductive performance and the value of organic minerals are among the topics on the programme.

In addition, the pig programme will consider topics such as intestinal integrity, semen analysis, weaning capacity and boar taint control and the poultry programme will also consider in ovo vaccination, evaluation of feed trials, single stage incubation and salmonella control. The Dairy programme will also focus on calf pneumonia, heat stress, reproductive health management and coccidiosis.

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Posted on February 5th, 2010 under Events, Livestock, Poultry. Tags: Asia, Bangkok, Conference, Dairy, Events, Pig, Poultry, Thailand. Comments: None

Encouraging people to invest in agribusiness can be more meaningful if they can be provided with some basic facts.

The domestic broiler industry has undergone a complete circle of starting from loose small farms into the entry of feedmilling companies, becoming integrators by supplying the day-old chicks, feeds, and going into contract growing, and into chicken dressing plants, and retail and institutional selling. And now, except for one or two integrators, the industry is being dominated by small regional players outsourcing their requirements from other small industry players.

Over the years, the likes of Robina Farms, Gen. Milling Corporation, Vitarich Corporation, RFM Corporation, had either completely been out of the industry, or had scaled down their operations that they are no longer their old self and having very little or negligible influence in the industry.

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Posted on August 26th, 2009 under Livestock, Poultry. Tags: Broiler, Pig, Robina Farm. Comments: None