What can research do for you?

On any given day, owners, managers and employees of pig farms must deal with multiple issues, such as pig health, production, feed delivery and general operations. This is just a fact of life and is to be expected. However, when a nutrition company discusses its swine research, it can be tempting to overlook the results and conclude that they don’t apply to your operation based on those day-to-day responsibilities. Some of the most common explanations people offer are that the research isn’t significant, that it’s not applicable to a modern pig farm or that it’s not economically justifiable.

The swine research done by Hubbard in our LLRC and LLRC2 facilities addresses those concerns. These modern, filtered swine barns allow for 10,000 nursery pigs to be on trial at one time, resulting in 20 to 25 trials being conducted a year. Our state-of-the-art feeding system also allows each pen to be fed its own diet, resulting in more treatment replications and greater statistical significance. Our field team of swine nutritionists works closely with producers and deeply understands the challenges they face on their farms. That collaboration allows us to research subjects like gut health, soybean meal, amino acids, and fiber levels and sources. Because these are real production barns, pigs do get sick at times, and when that happens, we have the unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of various feeding programs on disease-challenged pigs.

Ultimately, the research we conduct needs to have value for you, our customer. The positive feedback we get on products like POWERSTART® Solo indicates that we’re on the right track. Another advantage of our research program is that often we’re able to take the questions we get from our customers and answer them through our research trials.

What can research do for you? It addresses the challenges you face on your farm and provides solutions. It uncovers opportunities for improved performance, lower costs of production or even ways to simply make life easier for you.

Take an inside look at our newest barn, the Leavenworth Livestock Research Center (LLRC2), and if you have questions or see an opportunity, please contact your Hubbard Feeds representative.