FEED FOR THOUGHT ▶▶▶


Are you deficient? I


f anything positive came out of 2020 or the Covid-19 pandemic it was the mounting evidence indicating how important vitamin status, especially D, is to stay healthy and fight off disease. From the beginning I have had my fam- ily on a rigid dietary supplement programme, especially for D, C and zinc.


Then the vaccination being developed in record time was the cherry on top. Since my husband is a first responder, he received his first round in early Janu- ary; just in case you were worried, he did not grow two heads or have any other adverse side effects. But many conversations I have had recently have turned into discussions about lameness and potential vitamin deficiencies, either coming in from feed analysis or necropsies in animals. The pigs in the photo are an example of one of the po- tential cases I was asked for my opinion on most recently. It is something remarkably familiar to me from either a disease per- spective, which is less likely in newborns, or potential vitamin K deficiency. I tended to jump more to the latter position as it has been a familiar topic of late. Why so many inquiries about vitamin defi-


ciencies lately? For starters, a strategy to mitigate the threat of African Swine Fe- ver coming into the USA from feed ingredients originating from China or other infected areas has many producers quarantining or holding their vitamin pre- mixes for 30–60 days. Also, when vitamin A was so volatile in late 2019 through early 2020, many producers re-evaluated their overages to save on costs. All while we easily forget about how vulnerable fat-soluble vitamin stability is. Combine that with the fact that mycotoxin contamination can lead to vitamin K deficiency, and we could easily have a train wreck on our hands in the field. I find it very frustrating as a nutritionist that we rarely evaluate micronutrient re- quirements in our diets or devote much research into continued learning be- cause of commodity-based decision making. Then when we run trials, we base decisions on a single trial and say it did not improve average daily gain or feed conversion ratio and we do not change our requirements. However, it is quite evident that in a disease challenge our tightly controlled re- search trials do not repeat themselves and we are left in situations where there is no clear answer. The bigger question is what if we made a small insurance investment in running higher levels of mi- cronutrients; would it result in fewer disease outbreaks or losses due to seasonal losses of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome or flu, for instance? As we are pressured more and more to move away from antibiotics in tight margin markets, we will need to rethink what truly is optimal in our diets, because what might have been optimal two years ago could be deficient tomorrow. In the meantime, stay healthy and safe, and I hope all of you are thriving in 2021.


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Casey Bradley For Casey Bradley, growing up on a mixed swine and crop farm in Southwest Michigan eventually led to a successful career in swine nutrition. She currently spends her days as president of the Sunswine Group.


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