Eye On Europe: Scots find a way to produce bacon with less salt
Thursday, June 10, 2010
An innovative project has found that leaving the skin on bacon sides during wet-curing cuts salt content by 25 per cent – and reduces fat, too
by NORMAN DUNN
Bacon with 25 per cent less salt than the average product – and 20 per cent less fat, too – has been developed by a "food innovation team" from Abertay University in Scotland with backing from government, the meat processing sector and the farming industry.
This project concentrated on the processing of the hog carcass. Unlike the procedure with standard bacon, the Scottish researchers left the skin on the bacon sides during wet-curing. This automatically leads to less salt in the meat because the skin absorbs up to 25 per cent, according to Jennifer Robertson, a dietician involved in the project. She adds that this salt is then removed when the bacon sides are skinned after curing. The sides then undergo an extra session of fat trimming by hand.
In Britain, the government target for salt content in bacon is 2.88 grams per 100 grams of meat by 2012. The new high-health bacon has easily bettered this with an average content of 2.29 grams.
Other projects in the same program – which is backed by a C$70,000 government R&D grant – are looking at reduction of salt and saturated fats in other popular British meat dishes, such as pork sausages, black puddings and various meat pies.
Farmers are welcoming the new process, which has yet to be applied to a commercial brand, because they see it as a way of improving the image of pork in an increasingly health-conscious market dominated by poultry meats and their products.
An index for pinpointing problem sows
Sometimes sows are kept on for another gestation when they shouldn't be. The result: such "at risk" sows either die, or have to be culled during pregnancy or while nursing.
Failure to predict such disasters has a negative animal welfare aspect, as well as producing economic penalties for the farmer. Despite this, many herd managers have a fairly vague approach to determining whether a sow will last another cycle or not. This, at least, is the finding of a Danish research team from the Department of Animal Health and Bioscience, University of Aarhus.
The team decided to help in this respect by developing a "Weak Sow Index" (WSI) to help more precise identification of sows with a poor prognosis for survival in the coming breeding cycle.
Observations to identify these weak sows, explains team leader Dr. Jan Tid Sørensen, have to be conducted routinely and systematically, preferably at litter weaning or in the service centre. Factors to watch for include lameness and other foot and leg problems, poor condition score, general dirtiness, shoulder ulcers and wounds, including scrapes and bites, particularly vulva bites.
The weak sow index is designed to include all these factors via a weighted points system which, when totalled, indicates sow survival chances with more precision.
Observations of 2,875 pregnant sows in 33 herds have been made to date in creating the WSI. In the three months following first inspection of the sows involved, 14 per cent (119 sows) were "involuntarily culled," including 46 whose conditions had become so poor that they had to be sent to slaughter, 44 sudden deaths and 29 euthanized because of illness or injuries.
Dr. Sørensen emphasizes that still more work has to be done on perfecting the index before it can be released for farmer use in commercial herds.
French system identifies immature piglets that need help
Take a physically immature piglet and foster it into a more mature litter and the chances are that the animal won't survive. Lallemand Animal Nutrition, a French research company, says survival of immature piglets that get wrongly fostered, or don't get other forms of special care, is at least 20 per cent lower than that of healthier, better-developed littermates.
The problem is that these immature members of the litter are not always easy to identify, sometimes not being the smallest, lightest or even slowest in the litter.
Now, a system developed by Lallemand takes other factors into account for identifying piglets most at risk in a litter. For instance, Lallemand finds that the head of an immature piglet usually appears larger, with a more pronounced oval shape and a straight forehead with bulging eyes. And the skin covering is tighter – without the folds found in more mature piglets. These piglets also tend to lie apart from other litter members and often lie on their sides.
Such findings have been backed up by checking the vital organs of piglets with these characteristics. Lallemand researchers find these organs are often significantly lighter than their healthier mates.
This system for identifying piglets that need special help, or more care in fostering, includes litter inspection as part of the post-natal routine on commercial farms. The results should also be used as a factor in breeding sow selection.
Research leading to the system's development was carried out on a 400-sow herd with more than 900 piglets monitored from birth to weaning. Among the findings were that only 62 per cent of piglets designated immature according to the above criteria survived in the commercial herd, compared with 89 per cent of the more mature ones. Also, surviving immature litter members weighed an average 4.7 kilograms at weaning; their more mature mates 5.7 kilograms.
The researchers found that 11 per cent of all liveborn piglets in the study could be described as immature, with older sows in the herd producing litters with up to 25 per cent immature piglets.
The roller-coaster of swine production costs in Europe
"Common market" might be the political description of the European Union (EU), but as far as hog farmers are concerned there's nothing common about production conditions in the member countries.
A review of costs faced by hog farmers in 11 European countries during 2008 by international swine sector expert group InterPIG highlighted, for instance, that in Sweden the equivalent of C$119 was required to produce a 30-kilogram weaner, compared to only $74 in Britain. InterPIG reports that Britain has the lowest average figure because its tendency towards outdoor weaner production helps keep down building, energy and veterinary costs. In summer 2008, 42 per cent of the country's sows were in outdoor systems.
Sweden, on the other hand, has almost 100 per cent indoor herds and associated higher energy costs, along with what is claimed to be Europe's highest labour charges. As might be expected, Sweden also tops the survey costs for producing a slaughter hog at around $2.90/kilogram liveweight. Actually, hog feeders in Italy face an even higher production bill of 16 cents/kilogram more, but only because the hogs are not slaughtered at the EU average of around 110 kilograms – more like 160 kilograms for the specialized Italian ham and sausage trade.
A big surprise is that Britain, with its very cheap weaner production, has final pork production costs not much lower than Sweden's at $2.74/kilogram liveweight.
Why? Well, one reason is that overall performance is not too good with outdoor herds producing an average of only 21-22 weaners per sow each year.
Average performers in this respect, such as Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy, manage around 24 weaners per sow each year, France over 25 and Danish and Dutch producers from 27 upwards.
It's not surprising, therefore, that the latter two countries have easily the best returns from their swine sectors in the InterPIG survey. Top efficiency along with larger than average breeding units – 50 per cent of Danish breeding units have more than 500 sows and the 3,000 Dutch breeding units average 350 sows – mean weaners are produced at an average total cost of just $85 and $89 apiece.
These advantages allow 110 kilogram slaughter hogs to be produced for an average $2.58/kilogram slaughter weight in the Netherlands and three to four cents more in Denmark.
Dutch offer simple management tips for increasing piglet birth weight
There's scope to increase piglet birth weights by over 400 grams through sometimes relatively simple changes in management and feeding, according to a recent survey of 19 Dutch swine farms involving 7,000 sows.
The leading global breeding company Topigs ran the survey and the crucial factors influencing birthweight were defined based on the results from the different management applications on the farms. For instance, where an extra kilogram of feed per day was given during the insemination phase, individual birth weight in the next litter was increased by up to 45 grams. And higher than normal levels of feed energy and digestible protein content were shown by the survey to increase weight in the first hour by a little over 50 grams.
But lots of other factors leading to heavier newborn piglets were identified. On farms with a quarantine procedure for bought-in gilts, the average birthweight of piglets was 39 grams higher compared with farms where gilts were directly introduced. Where prostaglandin was used at farrowing, average birth weight was 41 grams lower than on farms that relied on natural birth.
Background to this research is the fact that steady breeding progress towards larger litters brings with it reductions in piglet birthweights. Looking at the Topigs breeding database shows an increase of one piglet per litter means average birth weight of litter members can drop by from 30 to 50 grams. Research with other genetic lines in Denmark and France over the past decade has underlined this tendency.
The Dutch-based breeding company decided to search for management factors that could increase birth weight on the basis of an 80-question survey covering all aspects of farm and herd management, along with swine performance.
Comparing birth weights with management practices allowed identification of factors that could help. Similar genetics were being used on all the survey farms and litter sizes were also much the same. But herd average birth weight of piglets varied by as much as 200 grams.
Nutrition levels were found to be one of the major keys to heavier piglets. Apart from the positive effect of "flushing" – increasing sow feed during the insemination phase – it was shown that increasing feed by around a kilogram right through gestation and nursing also positively influenced birth weights. Extra digestible lysine during gestation and higher levels of crude fat while nursing also helped, the nursing diet allowing better body regeneration by the sow for bigger litter members next time around.
Where sows were kept loose housed in groups during pregnancy, the piglet birth weights were also higher than with sows in stall systems. This was found to add an extra 61 grams per piglet on average. And general hygiene also had a big effect on piglet weight, according to the survey. The newborn pigs weighed an average 104 grams more on farms with good hygiene and 224 grams more where standards of cleanliness were judged very good.
Those organizing the survey caution that not all the birth weight advantages are scientifically significant and that the final total of over 400 grams extra for all measures is really a theoretical figure, as no single farm included all the plus factors in management.
But the main point of the exercise was identifying the factors that could immediately add to better birth weights in a situation of increasing litter sizes. Of those, the researchers decided that overall farm hygiene had probably the largest effect and was normally the easiest factor to improve on a working farm.
New slaughter system for guaranteed weighing and grading accuracy
Absolute transparency and independent control for hog carcass weighing and grading results in the slaughterhouse have been introduced by the largest German-based pork processor, TönniesFleisch.
Tönnies, which slaughters 12 million swine annually with a market share in Germany of 22 per cent, is pioneering in Europe the direct sending of data from automatic weighing and grading of carcasses to a state consumer protection organisation (LANUV) for monitoring. Naturally, the results are also immediately available to the farmers concerned.
The main point is that, now, the slaughter operation itself has no access to the data and cannot influence it in any way, because the results are collected from Fat-o-Meater and AutoFOM grading points into an officially sealed "black box" and then cabled directly to the monitoring organization. There, the slaughter data are first automatically checked for plausibility with new software.
Company chief Clemens Tönnies, who has already pioneered a series of welfare-based hog slaughter procedures at his plants in Germany, including spraying of waiting animals to keep them calm prior to CO² stunning in groups, comments that the absolute transparency of automatically collected and independently monitored weighing and grading data is something he would like to see in all slaughter plants.
The current project, at the Tönnies main plant in Westphalia, is limited to 50 participating hog producers over a period of six months. But already the company is planning to introduce the independent monitoring system at another of its plants. BP