A very important component of a swine herd management plan is nutrition. Boehringer Ingelheim’s Swine Health Seminar featured nutritional consultant, David Funderburke. He and his wife have their own business, working with large producers domestically and internationally.
In his presentation, David said that producers need to apply the technology that’s available and “push the limits” so they can capture as much value from feed as possible. Since his clients have different commodity positions and are different in the types of risks they’ll take, he says he tries to fine tune their feeding programs to fit both their personality and what’s going on inside their operation as far as costs and budgets.
Looking forward he says the cost of energy to produce a pig is going up so he says we need to find more ways to release energy from feed. He encourages producers to look at alternative energy sources.
You can listen to my interview with David here: bi-nc-08-funderburke.mp3