Pigs and Science make a great couple. The Pig Industry has been very demanding of Science and Science has delivered big time. But does Science ever hold our industry back?
I think it is true that the older we get the more we cling to scientific beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Some call this ‘cognitive prejudice’. I have had a bad dose of it twice in recent years. At the turn of the century Science proved conventional phytase levels cannot work in the presence of high levels of Zinc Oxide in Starter diets and the dogma lasted for a decade. It was not until early in 2010 that I finally recovered from my first bout of cognitive prejudice and put SuperDosing of phytase into all commercial starter diets Primary Diets manufacture. It took an international phosphate shortage to force a desperate trial using very high levels of phytase to see if we could overwhelm the Zinc Oxide issues and release some phosphorus.
We saw improvements unrelated to phosphorus which I just refused to believe. However we persisted with further trials and in the end an overwhelming dataset from our university program overwhelmed my disbelief. We now know that the benefits of SuperDosing have nothing to do with phosphorus release but with Phytate destruction. Science prolonged a dogma and then dragged its heels in accepting a new truth and in so doing denied the Pig Industry valuable margin for several years.
I experienced the second dose of cognitive prejudice more recently in the area of improving lifetime performance. During a search to find novel ways of creating a palatable pre-weaning diet to drive feed intake, we trialled a new generation of product through a university program. It resulted in significant improvements in post weaning performance but disbelievingly showed little or none of the anticipated increase in preweaning feed intake or weaning weight. My cognitive prejudice kicked in ‘This just could not be happening. This must have happened by chance’. Conventional diets and conventional manufacture had never done this in 40 years of testing, so I believed this can’t be the case with our new product.
Other scientists reinforced my own disbelief but then a different university trial gave even better lifetime performance results. Further trials produced impressive lifetime performance advantages to slaughter so I had to prove this phenomenon could be repeated at farm level. It delivered similar results on 4 out of the first 5 closely monitored farm trials and in so doing confirmed the new category of ‘accelerators’ that switch on lifetime performance when offered to neonates. This new accelerator delivers around at least £1/pig net margin (twice that of SuperDosing) and our ongoing research into its mode of action is in place to remove any remaining traces of my cognitive prejudice. I have found the best way to overcome my own cognitive prejudice is to rely heavily on data and so it is encouraging to see that it is now probably the most popular pre-weaning product being used in the UK
(Previously published in International Pig Topics)
