As feed costs eat up an ever greater portion of producer budgets, finding ways to reduce that expense can help trim losses and shift the ink color from red to black.

There’s a lot of talk these days about enhancing the image of the pork industry in the public eye. From a science standpoint, however, it may be the use of cutting edge imagery that catches the eye of producers and plants seeking an advantage. While image might not be everything, high-tech imaging could be the next big thing for the pork industry in assessing meat and carcass quality and gathering valuable information on live animals.

Is boosting income or cutting costs the key to success? In pork production, it’s like choosing between food and water for survival: they’re both kind of important. Since the revenue side depends on market forces that are largely beyond your control, trimming expenses is a focal point for science and industry.

Whether travelling by air or clinging to the side of a trailer, pathogens get around, so science is working overtime to stop the intruders in their tracks.

As your pigs grow, so do your profits. Of course, nothing in the pork industry is that easy. Keeping your grower-finisher pigs well fed is critical to success, but high feed costs can quickly eat into your margins. So just as growing families try to stretch their dollars at the supermarket, research is helping producers make their feed dollars go farther with growing pigs.

While each project has a unique focus, they’re all aimed at keeping pigs in the pink of health and your business squarely in the black.

Carnosine, a molecule made up of two amino acids (β-alanine and L-histidine), is naturally produced in the body. It is mainly concentrated in the skeletal muscles and brain, and is also found in the heart and other tissues.

As important as nutrition may be for sows and piglets, if you don’t get your hog to market and sell it for the maximum profit, nothing else matters. So it should be no surprise that the care and feeding of growing-finishing pigs is a prime concern of producers and, by extension, of researchers.

Researchers understand that a strong beginning is essential to piglet development, and milk plays a huge role in sows starting their litters on the right hoof. No wonder then, that while science targets sow nutrition from a number of angles, maximizing sow milk yield continues to be a major focus of research.

In a business where margins are thin, a few ill pigs can be hazardous to your fiscal health. As a result, research has made this a major focus of their efforts on behalf of industry. In particular, three threats to pigs received special attention in recent studies: Brachyspira, PRRS and PEDv.