High-Tech Hogs Root for Science UA Researches Cleaner Swine

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When Professor Charles Maxwell came to the University of Arkansas in 1996, the Swine Research Center was no silk purse. If not a sow’s ear, the program was at least a prideless one for a university whose mascot is based on wild pig lore.

Modestly, Maxwell said the facilities were a little run down.

But Professor Keith Lusby, the animal science department head and former student of Maxwell’s, said swine research at the UA was virtually non-existent at the time. That’s why, upon Maxwell’s retirement from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Lusby hired the researcher.

In 2001, the program built two new finishing buildings worth a total of $725,000 and now produces between 2,400 and 2,500 pigs annually. (“Finishing” refers to the time it takes to grow a weaned pig to market weight.) Sale of those pigs to local butchers and Excel Corp., a Cargill Inc. subsidiary based in Witchita, Kan., is estimated to bring in about $300,000 this calendar year.

The money goes back to the animal science department and eventually supports research in all the programs including cattle and poultry, Lusby said.

“It’s like any other farm,” he said.

Maxwell has his eye on gleaning more money if he can. He said he’d like to increase his budget by about $100,000 to help pay for more students to work at the center. It takes about $85,000 a year to run the bare essentials at the research unit now, which pays the gas and light bills, maintenance and some miscellaneous student wages.

The UA Swine Research Center is located at a couple of different spots on 3,000 acres of rolling farmland and woods near the small hamlet of Savoy, about nine miles west of Fayetteville. The area, which Maxwell and Lusby simply refer to as “Savoy,” is a on a long-term lease from the federal government, and serves as the UA’s research farm for cattle and poultry as well.

The swine program currently farrows, or births, about 300 pigs about every five weeks, Maxwell said. That’s with a target of 30 sows giving birth to a litter of about 10 each.

The program hit a personal 37-year career best for Maxwell in calendar 2004 with an average of 9.8 piglets farrowed per sow, he said. That gives researchers the potential to hold 10 nursery trials and 10 finishing trials while evenly distributing the genes.

There are five major areas of research under way at the swine unit, and that doesn’t include a sow trial Maxwell said would start soon. Basically, all of them involve some form of managing what goes in the pig, and studying what comes out — whether it be waste, weight gain or improved immunity.

“Anything from farrow to finish that has some potential of improving performance, improving carcass quality, improving shelf life — any of those factors — we would be interested in pursuing, and are pursuing all those areas,” Maxwell said.

Market Weight

According to a census by the United State Department of Agriculture, the number of hog farms in both Benton and Washington counties dropped from a combined 281 in 1987, to 205 in 1992, to 122 in 1997, a 57 percent decrease within a decade.

Arkansas’ total pig production rose from 310,000 head in 2003 to 330,000 head in 2004, according to the USDA. Iowa on the other hand produced 16.1 million head in 2004. Arkansas produced about 2 percent of that amount.

Maxwell said the South has never been a great place to grow hogs because it costs too much to ship grain south to feed them to market weight, then to ship those heavier pigs north, where the majority of slaughter plants are. Therefore, most pig production is in the Corn Belt, which is in the north-central plains from northern Missouri to southern Minnesota and from eastern Nebraska to Ohio, he said.

Gary Mickelson, spokesman for Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale, said the company processes about 18 million head a year in its four Midwest plants. Most of the hogs the company slaughters are purchased from independent growers in the Corn Belt.

One exception is the Pork Group Inc., a Rogers-based subsidiary of Tyson. It maintains an inventory of about 300,000 head. Currently, the subsidiary purchases hogs from about 75 growers in Oklahoma and Missouri, and none in Arkansas. The company either owns or leases any pig growing operations inside the state, Mickelson said.

In September of 2002, Tyson restructured its hog business and discontinued relationships with 132 hog producers in Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Lusby said many of those farmers now have contracts with Cargill.

Bacteria Backed

One of the current research initiatives at Savoy is the development of a swine model for direct-fed microbial health benefits. In other words, Maxwell wants to find out what good bacteria to feed pigs that will help keep them healthy and putting on weight at a reasonable pace — particularly young pigs, since their immune systems are weaker.

It’s a three-phase, three-year study that will conclude in June 2006. The first objective, which has been met, was to establish a database of beneficial bacteria from the gastrointestinal microbial population. From there, researchers intend to look at the changes in immune and gastrointestinal cells, and their response to the microbial, according to a paper on the study.

Maxwell’s paper said there are potential human benefits in the form of a model for diarrheal diseases or as microbial supplements for humans.

“Many of the same viral and bacterial organisms that are causative agents of disease in the human population are problems for the young pig,” the paper said.

When it comes to past real world and industrywide applications though, Maxwell is still modest about his research.

“I don’t know of a single one that I can say that ‘this is a product that we shepherded through the system out there,'” he said.

But one product, a bacillus organism put directly in the pigs’ diet, had at least five trials at the research center from 1999 to 2003, and Maxwell said the UA was fairly instrumental in proving the product could do what makers said it could.

MicroSource “S,” was designed to help hog farmers clean their facilities. According to marketing materials by Agtech Products Inc. of Waukesha, Wis., the product, “is a biological waste treatment product that utilizes the powerful waste digesting activity of natural bacteria and enzymes to rapidly break down solids and reduce odors associated with the storage of swine manure.”

Agtech is an agriculture research and development company with about 30 employees.

Ellen Davis, project scientist with Agtech and also a former student of Maxwell’s, worked on the MircroSource “S” trials while earning her doctorate in swine nutrition and immunology from the UA. She said the product works as an anti-caking agent and keeps pig manure viscous, thus floors of growing sheds are easier to clean.

But during trials for MicroSourse “S,” which Maxwell proved to live up to manufacturer’s claims, an unexpected benefit to the product came about. It was shown that the same pig weight could be reached by using 3 percent less feed — no small matter when talking tonnages. It’s been an effective sales and marketing tool as well, Davis said.

Davis said this led to other trials at the UA and there may be more in the future that deal with ammonia reduction because the company’s data show the pungent chemical is reduced as a result of MicroSource, but there have been no university studies.

MicroSource is provided to about 8 to 10 percent of the finishing hogs in the United States, some 10 to 11 million head, Davis said.

Waste Management

On a ride out to look at the Swine Research Center, Maxwell drives past two long, gleaming finishing sheds that resemble common Northwest Arkansas chicken houses. He pulls the aging UA station wagon onto the turf and stops before four lagoons of pig waste.

A touchy subject with area farmers, politicians and neighboring Oklahomans, phosphorus content is measured at the ponds. Each one contains manure from a specific quadrant within one of the grow sheds, and the pigs in those quadrants are fed a diet with an additive.

In the formal study report, dated December 2003 and called Project 900, phosphorus is measured in the half-acre holding areas, but also as the manure is applied to four patches of fescue, just up the hill from the grow sheds. The patches, which are really one hillside divided by wire fences, drain into holding tanks. Phosphorus runoff can be measured this way, and scientists can extrapolate what effect a dietary additive may have in the real world.

Though Maxwell said the study is inconclusive, it was found that an enzyme additive, phytase, reduced the phosphorus content in the lagoons by almost 25 percent.

In the runoff study, the final report said, “the watershed treated with phytase manure produced the lowest total [phosphorus] and percentage of soluble and total [phosphorus] runoff among the watersheds, even lower than that observed in the unfertilized watershed.”

There were variations in the volumes of runoff from each of the four patches of fescue, so researchers declared the runoff experiment inconclusive.

Maxwell said further research into phosphorus will continue.