If you plan on attending the 22nd European Symposium on Poultry Nutrition (ESPN) at Gdansk in Poland in a couple of weeks, here’s a piece of advice, free of charge: Make a plan.

Imagine that the African swine fever (ASF) virus gets out of control.

Is it possible for African swine fever (ASF) virus to be transmitted through feed? The answer is yes, and this is not news.

Molasses, either from sugar beets or sugar cane, is a common enough ingredient throughout most of the world. In fact, it is an indispensable ingredient in ruminant diets, and perhaps this widespread usage has removed it from feeds for other species – pigs in particular.

There are many guidelines around, but most are based on the Holstein breed and do not take into account inter- and intra-breed mature animal weight, birth weight and growth rate.

Those who have nothing good to say about their own products or services instead identify true or imaginary faults in the products of others.

Creating or reviewing a nutrition program for a mega animal producer is rather a different exercise compared with working for a feed/nutrition supplier or any other animal producer.

A friend of mine wants to buy a robotic milking machine because he is gadget friendly and enjoys new technology. The size of his milk cow herd is not large enough to justify such expense, but he is going to do it, just because he wants to.

The most common complaint of nutrition suppliers (additives mostly) is that they cannot get (easily) into large (mega) farms. It appears to them that such mega producers prefer to use simple nutrition programs without much in terms of added (modern) nutritional supplements. There are many reasons why such large operations prefer simple nutrition programs, and some are offered here for discussion.

A larger animal has larger maintenance needs that need to be taken into account when calculating efficiency.

Large parent animals produce large offspring that grow rapidly and efficiently. At least this is the general perception and it is true to a certain point. But it is not the whole truth, because the maintenance needs of large-framed animals are often ignored, or rather expected to be roughly the same across all genotypes, within a given species.

The success or failure of any piglet nutrition program depends on the degree to which it reaches its targets in terms of growth performance, which often is used as an indicator of profitability under intensive production conditions.