Animal Bytes

Take Home Message: For broilers fed diets high in rapeseed meal, include enzymes to enhance performance
Non-starch polysaccharide (NSP)-degrading and phytase enzymes incorporated in rapeseed meal based broiler diet could be beneficial. That was the finding of a trail, carried out by Iranian scientists, which was presented to delegates at the British Society of Animal Science’s [...]

Placing water drinkers apart and the use of bowl rather than bite drinkers will save water costs.

Rearing environment may affect the gut microbiota – and therefore the health – of pigs.

Different pig breeds respond differently in terms of fat deposition to the levels of nutrients supplied, particularly protein and energy.

Where stocking rates are adequate, larger and more productive crossbred ewes can be maintained in the hill environment without deleterious consequences for survival or pregnancy rate.

A team, led by AFBI Hillsborough’s Tianhai Yan, has discovered that the manure nitrogen output associated with 1kg of milk production increased with increasing dietary crude protein concentration and that a dietary protein content of 15% was optimal for milk output whilst reducing manure N output.

Manipulation of individual cow diets in early lactation may help to maintain daily energy status.

The challenge facing industrialised countries is to negotiate a long-term global regulatory framework, with intermediate targets, that can reduce greenhouse emissions to a level that limits the increase in global mean surface temperature to 2oC above pre-industrial levels.

Attempts to calculate the large-scale consequences of global warming for agriculture and food production, although difficult, do confirmed that most of the increase in production will come from the agriculture of developed countries, which mostly ‘benefit’ from climate change.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture is a laudable and necessary objective. It should be done, however, in the knowledge that not only will there be ‘disbenefits’ as well as benefits, but also that these ‘disbenefits’ will be compounded by issues relating to competition for resources.