Farmscape for February 9, 2017

The Head of Perdue University's Animal Science Department says prebiotics, probiotics and organic acids offer the greatest potential as a replacements for in-feed antibiotics among the newly weaned piglets.
Typically piglets are weaned at about three weeks of age and it's at this point, when they are shifting from mother's milk to solid feed, that they face the greatest risk from infections.
Dr. Alan Mathew, the Head of Purdue University's Animal Science Department, says this is where probiotics and prebiotics offer the greatest potential.

Clip-Dr. Alan Mathew-Purdue University:
Probiotics are really a live organism, typically a beneficial bacterium or possibly a yeast, that we hope to get into the gut so it flourishes and replicates and protects the gut from pathogens.
Prebiotics are not a living organism.
Rather they are a nutrient typically a complex carbohydrate that helps feed those beneficial organisms that include probiotics that may put in there.
So I think, in the newly weaned pig, probiotics, prebiotics still have good potential because they can help that pig transition to that corn based or grain based diet and get them though those two or three days that are really critical to that young pig, along with organic acids.
They are weak acids that can help maintain the gut pH and keep it in that good range of pH, kind of low where beneficial organisms can survive and E. coli and others won't thrive.
Some of those pathogens like the higher pH.
So organic acids do have a place in this strategy for alternatives to antibiotics.
They can be effective.
The challenges are mostly in the older pig where the stomach juices kind of overwhelm the whole pH picture of the gut.
So getting those weak acids to have an effect further downstream is challenging.

Dr. Mathew says these are tried and true strategies that, as we better understand how to apply them, can be effective.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork