I'm pissed off with the BBC. Don’t get me wrong, my support for the licence fee is strong, but it’s been tested twice in the same day (yesterday). First, Richard Bacon (standing in for Victoria Derbyshire) on Radio 5Live yesterday morning did a fawning interview with Peter Andre. It was little more than a puff for the Aussie crooner’s latest musical offering, more suited to Smashey’n’Nicey FM.
Then came the evening telly news, the production of which is clearly a tough assignment without Parliament’s daily feed of easy stories. They’d dug out of the archives footage of the Belfast troubles in 1969*, on the flimsy pretext of their 40th anniversary. News content? Zero. Relevance to today’s society? Some, though without any analysis or linkage to the present day, this was somewhat limited. Hard graft for BBC reporters? Of course not.
Surely a publicly funded broadcaster’s news output ought to contain ‘news’ (i.e. stuff that is new......although one theory about the origin of ‘news’ is that it stands for North, East, West, South, or so I heard once on Mastermind), and information that’s relevant and useful to licence payers. Indeed, this is one of the most compelling justifications for the licence fee. But when you watch or listen to BBC news, how much of it is relevant to making the world (or just the UK) either a better place or at least a better informed and less prejudiced place? And how much is celebrity gossip?
Yours grumpily.
*By the way, I would actually like to see an ‘Irish History for Dummies’ documentary, wherein the troubles in Belfast 40 years ago would have a valid place. But not in today’s news.
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Why ask a question when we already know the answer?
First published by Feed Compounder magazine, UK, Dec-07 edition.
A looming deadline for this sermon means I’m confined to barracks and unable to hear “How to improve the eating quality of pork” at the Society of Feed Technology’s mid-November meeting. But it doesn’t really matter because I already know the answer.
It is to buy your pork from the Churncote Farm Shop on the Welshpool Road just west of Shrewsbury, where the proprietors really do know the answer.
On the butcher’s slab, Churncote pork is red meat, not white. But too often, eating the meat off a supermarket-bought chop is more like chewing some cheap carpet remnant, but only if you have a Stanley knife handy for dissecting it into bite size chunks. Its Churncote rival exudes a succulent liquor when cooked and you can cut it with a rusty spoon. Despite this, a small domestic problem for me is that other family members say they don’t really like pork, as a consequence I hasten to add of exposure to the wrong sort. But I’m working on them.
Surely we don’t need any more technology to answer the question of eating quality. Just rear the few remaining UK pigs outdoors and capitalise or their combined rarity and excellence by pricing the meat like venison rather than South American chicken.
SOPs for farming – the new 21st century paradigm
There are many areas of animal production where we need to put more effort into applying existing technology and knowledge, rather than pursuing new. In dairy cow nutrition, one of the most active disciples of this hypothesis appears to be Keenan. They are taking well-proven principles and turning them into programmes that farmers can adopt as standard operating procedures (SOPs); they have even adopted the SOP acronym.
It would take an American to coin the term ‘routine-ization’, but it sums up this procedure-based approach perfectly. The term was used at a recent dairy health symposium by Pfizer’s chief cattle vet in the USA, Roger L Saltman, in describing the more advanced adoption of SOPs in that country compared with here.
Of course, closer to home for readers of this journal, all feed mills have their own set of SOPs, without which product consistency would disappear and things would grind quickly to a halt. Likewise, all mass production of cars is done mainly by robots, because as well as being cheaper than people and not taking sick leave, they do their job accurately 24/7.
So I wonder why more effort and investment isn’t going into taking the knowledge and technology we already possess and turning it into evidence-based SOPs for the widespread adoption and benefit of our farmers?
Credit where it’s due, the Milk Development Council is funding the aptly named Mastitis Diagnosis and Control (ie MDC) plan, which in essence is a detailed set of SOPs that will solve most mastitis problems on most farms if it is adopted fully, accurately and consistently by farmers.
And don’t they just need it? The national average incidence of clinical mastitis is about 60 cases per 100 cows per year. Yet the 2007 winner of Farmers Weekly’s Dairy Farmer of the Year Award, Geoff Spence from Northallerton, gets eight cases per 100 cows per year in his 350-cow herd. The average case of clinical mastitis costs about £200. But fret not, once the milk price reaches 30p/litre, most herds will be able to afford losing £10,000 per 100 cows per year from to avoidable clinical mastitis, won’t they? That’s ok then.
Meanwhile, farmers like Mr Spence already have their own SOPs. When I interviewed him in October, he was just back from holiday in Egypt to find that the cows (and his staff) hadn’t missed him: No disasters, no near misses, in truth no problems at all. And the reason? Well trained staff following established written SOPs.
Elsewhere on too many farms, wheels are being reinvented and mistakes keep being repeated. Thank God the milk price has gone up.
Reasons to be cheerful, 1-2-3
At another farmer meeting this autumn, a very chipper feed specialist really cheered me up, the combination of rising milk prices and rising raw material prices being the apparent source of his joy. Feed ingredient costs were giving him the opportunity to put up prices sufficiently to restore healthy margins, while better milk prices sugared the pill for his customers. Or so I thought.
However, while this seems so obvious, the reason for mentioning it here is that my new friend’s spring in his step is by no means universal in the dairy feed sector. And then I read a little book which made me challenge my assumptions about where the spring in his step came from and made me realise why there remain some miserable sods about.
The book is called Fish and will only take you a couple of hours to read. But it has the potential to make a lifetime’s difference to the lives of people who adopt its ethos, which has four components to which I cannot do justice here so you’ll have to get the book:
[1] We all start each day with a choice and what we choose can be independent of our circumstances: To be positive and chipper or negative and miserable.
[2] Include some playfulness in your day (clearly, this needs to be appropriate to one’s work context).
[3] Endeavour to make someone’s day in the course of what you do.
[4] Be present in the present, attentive to what’s going on around you.
Of course, a few people are lucky enough to be born this way. The book is about them, rather than for them; it’s for the rest of us. Maybe as a Christmas gift the bosses should buy a copy for each of their staff as well as themselves? I’ve already bought a copy for my adult kids.
Lessons in life from lout’s lager
In the last series of Hell’s Kitchen, head chef and philosopher Marco Pierre White said: “You can put a pig in a suit, but you won’t stop it grunting”, attributing this to his grandfather. This came back to mind when I saw the PR Week headline “Stella seeks support to shed ‘wife beater’ image”, then a few days later the Daily Mail’s: “Stella Artois was a marketing triumph – the lager that made millions by claiming to be ‘reassuringly expensive’. Now it’s dirt cheap and the yob’s drink of choice. So where did it all go wrong for the beer they call...WIFE BEATER’.
The strong, once-upon-a-time upmarket, lager’s re-branding as ‘Artois’ is “intended to end its association with drunken violence and loutish behaviour”, according to the PR-world’s rag. Granted, if the re-branding includes banning the use of buy-ten-get-an-abso-free offers and distribution via Bonkers Booze outlets, then it may stand a chance. But if all they do is give the pig a new name, then I’m afraid it’ll just carry on grunting.
The point here for all of us involved in marketing is that actions and behaviour speak louder than words. It doesn’t matter what new name you give to a strong lager, if it remains a cheap and widely available way of getting tanked up, then the old reality will prevail.
We may dismiss slogans like ‘reassuringly expensive’ as marketing puff, and we’d probably be correct when it comes to the impact, or lack thereof, on people’s rational thinking. But we all have two brains, a conscious rational one with which we think that we think; and a subconscious reactive one, sometimes called our reptile or limbic brain, over which we have little or no control, but which has immense control over us.
Subliminal influences, like oft-repeated exposure to marketing slogans, do have an effect on our subconscious, particularly is the slogan is consistent with the receiver’s view of reality. And our subconscious has a huge influence on our decisions. But people who drink real ale, aren’t exposed to the reality, under-privilege and poverty of the Great British underclass, and don’t read the papers, would probably still think of Stella as an up-market product. For millions of others, of course, the reality is that it’s one of the quickest and most affordable ways to get lashed, particularly if there’s a Bonkers Booze on the corner. So far be it for me to tell a multi-national brewing giant where it all went wrong...... but the everyday reality was allowed to become light years away from their aspiration.
Now what has this to do with the feed industry, you may ask. It is that in forming a reputation, reality prevails over image, and reality is what people see up-closest and most often. You know much better than me which parts of your business this applies to the most and therefore where investment in needed to build a stronger reputation.
‘Fish’ by Stephen C Lundin, Harry Paul and John Christensen is published by Hodder & Staughton, 2000.
A looming deadline for this sermon means I’m confined to barracks and unable to hear “How to improve the eating quality of pork” at the Society of Feed Technology’s mid-November meeting. But it doesn’t really matter because I already know the answer.
It is to buy your pork from the Churncote Farm Shop on the Welshpool Road just west of Shrewsbury, where the proprietors really do know the answer.
On the butcher’s slab, Churncote pork is red meat, not white. But too often, eating the meat off a supermarket-bought chop is more like chewing some cheap carpet remnant, but only if you have a Stanley knife handy for dissecting it into bite size chunks. Its Churncote rival exudes a succulent liquor when cooked and you can cut it with a rusty spoon. Despite this, a small domestic problem for me is that other family members say they don’t really like pork, as a consequence I hasten to add of exposure to the wrong sort. But I’m working on them.
Surely we don’t need any more technology to answer the question of eating quality. Just rear the few remaining UK pigs outdoors and capitalise or their combined rarity and excellence by pricing the meat like venison rather than South American chicken.
SOPs for farming – the new 21st century paradigm
There are many areas of animal production where we need to put more effort into applying existing technology and knowledge, rather than pursuing new. In dairy cow nutrition, one of the most active disciples of this hypothesis appears to be Keenan. They are taking well-proven principles and turning them into programmes that farmers can adopt as standard operating procedures (SOPs); they have even adopted the SOP acronym.
It would take an American to coin the term ‘routine-ization’, but it sums up this procedure-based approach perfectly. The term was used at a recent dairy health symposium by Pfizer’s chief cattle vet in the USA, Roger L Saltman, in describing the more advanced adoption of SOPs in that country compared with here.
Of course, closer to home for readers of this journal, all feed mills have their own set of SOPs, without which product consistency would disappear and things would grind quickly to a halt. Likewise, all mass production of cars is done mainly by robots, because as well as being cheaper than people and not taking sick leave, they do their job accurately 24/7.
So I wonder why more effort and investment isn’t going into taking the knowledge and technology we already possess and turning it into evidence-based SOPs for the widespread adoption and benefit of our farmers?
Credit where it’s due, the Milk Development Council is funding the aptly named Mastitis Diagnosis and Control (ie MDC) plan, which in essence is a detailed set of SOPs that will solve most mastitis problems on most farms if it is adopted fully, accurately and consistently by farmers.
And don’t they just need it? The national average incidence of clinical mastitis is about 60 cases per 100 cows per year. Yet the 2007 winner of Farmers Weekly’s Dairy Farmer of the Year Award, Geoff Spence from Northallerton, gets eight cases per 100 cows per year in his 350-cow herd. The average case of clinical mastitis costs about £200. But fret not, once the milk price reaches 30p/litre, most herds will be able to afford losing £10,000 per 100 cows per year from to avoidable clinical mastitis, won’t they? That’s ok then.
Meanwhile, farmers like Mr Spence already have their own SOPs. When I interviewed him in October, he was just back from holiday in Egypt to find that the cows (and his staff) hadn’t missed him: No disasters, no near misses, in truth no problems at all. And the reason? Well trained staff following established written SOPs.
Elsewhere on too many farms, wheels are being reinvented and mistakes keep being repeated. Thank God the milk price has gone up.
Reasons to be cheerful, 1-2-3
At another farmer meeting this autumn, a very chipper feed specialist really cheered me up, the combination of rising milk prices and rising raw material prices being the apparent source of his joy. Feed ingredient costs were giving him the opportunity to put up prices sufficiently to restore healthy margins, while better milk prices sugared the pill for his customers. Or so I thought.
However, while this seems so obvious, the reason for mentioning it here is that my new friend’s spring in his step is by no means universal in the dairy feed sector. And then I read a little book which made me challenge my assumptions about where the spring in his step came from and made me realise why there remain some miserable sods about.
The book is called Fish and will only take you a couple of hours to read. But it has the potential to make a lifetime’s difference to the lives of people who adopt its ethos, which has four components to which I cannot do justice here so you’ll have to get the book:
[1] We all start each day with a choice and what we choose can be independent of our circumstances: To be positive and chipper or negative and miserable.
[2] Include some playfulness in your day (clearly, this needs to be appropriate to one’s work context).
[3] Endeavour to make someone’s day in the course of what you do.
[4] Be present in the present, attentive to what’s going on around you.
Of course, a few people are lucky enough to be born this way. The book is about them, rather than for them; it’s for the rest of us. Maybe as a Christmas gift the bosses should buy a copy for each of their staff as well as themselves? I’ve already bought a copy for my adult kids.
Lessons in life from lout’s lager
In the last series of Hell’s Kitchen, head chef and philosopher Marco Pierre White said: “You can put a pig in a suit, but you won’t stop it grunting”, attributing this to his grandfather. This came back to mind when I saw the PR Week headline “Stella seeks support to shed ‘wife beater’ image”, then a few days later the Daily Mail’s: “Stella Artois was a marketing triumph – the lager that made millions by claiming to be ‘reassuringly expensive’. Now it’s dirt cheap and the yob’s drink of choice. So where did it all go wrong for the beer they call...WIFE BEATER’.
The strong, once-upon-a-time upmarket, lager’s re-branding as ‘Artois’ is “intended to end its association with drunken violence and loutish behaviour”, according to the PR-world’s rag. Granted, if the re-branding includes banning the use of buy-ten-get-an-abso-free offers and distribution via Bonkers Booze outlets, then it may stand a chance. But if all they do is give the pig a new name, then I’m afraid it’ll just carry on grunting.
The point here for all of us involved in marketing is that actions and behaviour speak louder than words. It doesn’t matter what new name you give to a strong lager, if it remains a cheap and widely available way of getting tanked up, then the old reality will prevail.
We may dismiss slogans like ‘reassuringly expensive’ as marketing puff, and we’d probably be correct when it comes to the impact, or lack thereof, on people’s rational thinking. But we all have two brains, a conscious rational one with which we think that we think; and a subconscious reactive one, sometimes called our reptile or limbic brain, over which we have little or no control, but which has immense control over us.
Subliminal influences, like oft-repeated exposure to marketing slogans, do have an effect on our subconscious, particularly is the slogan is consistent with the receiver’s view of reality. And our subconscious has a huge influence on our decisions. But people who drink real ale, aren’t exposed to the reality, under-privilege and poverty of the Great British underclass, and don’t read the papers, would probably still think of Stella as an up-market product. For millions of others, of course, the reality is that it’s one of the quickest and most affordable ways to get lashed, particularly if there’s a Bonkers Booze on the corner. So far be it for me to tell a multi-national brewing giant where it all went wrong...... but the everyday reality was allowed to become light years away from their aspiration.
Now what has this to do with the feed industry, you may ask. It is that in forming a reputation, reality prevails over image, and reality is what people see up-closest and most often. You know much better than me which parts of your business this applies to the most and therefore where investment in needed to build a stronger reputation.
‘Fish’ by Stephen C Lundin, Harry Paul and John Christensen is published by Hodder & Staughton, 2000.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Pneumonia requires antibiotic in 10% of dairy calves
PRESS RELEASE ISSUED ON BEHALF OF PFIZER ANIMAL HEALTH, WALTON OAKS, SURREY, UK
“This would increase substantially if you added the impact on in-contacts,” she says. “A major concern is that 44% of farmers said the issue of treating close contact calves at the same time had not been discussed with their vet.”
However, not all farmers are ignoring the in-contacts, although only 10% of farmers will also treat pen-mates or house-mates in most* cases, a further 8% in some* cases and 26% in a few* cases. (* ‘Most’, ‘some’ and ‘few’ were defined in the survey as ‘75-100%’, about ‘50%’ and ‘about 25%’ of cases respectively).
This “Good Start In Life” calf survey was sponsored by Rispoval® IntraNasal, Pfizer’s single-dose pneumonia vaccine for dairy calves. This sponsorship was not disclosed to farmers at the time the survey was carried out. Among the 443 participating farms, 57% had made changes in the last three years to improve calf health and/or growth rates.
The two improvements in joint top spot were better ventilation and vaccination. Next was allowing more space per calf, which Carolyn Hogan says is obviously a good move if calves are too crowded.
However, she warns that it is also possible for calf density to be too low in housing with a large air space, such that convection currents created by body heat are too weak to drive stale air out through the roof vents. “When this happens, the air circulates inside the building, with the result that calves are breathing stale air rather than fresh,” she says.
During the first three months of life, the survey finds that the second month is regarded by farmers as marginally higher risk for pneumonia than the first or third, possibly because this is when immune protection derived from colostrum is starting to wear off and before immunity derived from the environment has developed.
This would be consistent with the good colostrum practice evident from the survey: 91% of farmers have a golden rule for the timing and quantity of colostrum, the average being 2.98 litres within 5¾ hours of birth. While this is very close to the recommended three litres within six hours, Carolyn Hogan identifies a concern about the range of answers, especially where colostral intake is low.
In the extreme, some farmers said they aimed for nine litres within two hours of birth, whilst others only two litres within 12 hours. To make sure enough colostrum is taken within the target time, 32% of farmers maintain close supervision of suckling and a further 16% give a manual feed by bottle or stomach tube as a matter of routine.
As dairy herds get bigger and the workforce smaller, Carolyn Hogan says it would be easy, but wrong, to jump to the conclusion that calves come quite low down a dairy farm’s pecking order. Among the farmers taking part in the survey, 95% said new-born heifer calves represented their hopes and expectations of the future. She urges farmers to take every opportunity to discuss ways of improving calf health with their veterinary surgeon.
The prevention and treatment of pneumonia will be a feature of the Pfizer stand at the Dairy Event, where vets and livestock advisers will be available to discuss the main issues with farmers.
-ends-
RispovalR IntraNasal contains modified live BRSV and Pi3V viruses. POM-V. For further information please contact your veterinary surgeon or Pfizer Animal Health, Walton Oaks, Tadworth,
Reference
[1] Andrews A.H (2000) Cattle Practice Vol 8 Part 2: 109-114. This paper estimates a case of pneumonia in a dairy calf to cost £43 per treated animal on average. In the survey being reported here, the average farm reported 17 cases of pneumonia in the past year requiring antibiotic treatment. Cost estimate = 17 cases x £43/case = £731.
Milking the market for all it’s worth
He writes: “When Warner Brothers, the makers of Friends, renegotiated contracts at the end of series two, it was [Lisa] Kudrow [aka Phoebe Buffay] who suggested that the six lead players should negotiate as a collective. That way, she reasoned, the studio could not divide and rule. There would be no chance of one character being promoted as the star and paid more at the expense of the others; no possibility of a character being written out if he or she was in dispute over money. Warner Brothers would either pay them all or get none.”
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Don’t expect “somebody” to do anything. If you want to take advantage of the situation, do something yourself. Form an informal alliance with six to 10 like-minded fellows so that you have at least 10 million litres a year of bargaining power, then have a friendly chat with your current buyer, whether that’s one of the co-ops (who all need their tails peppering) or a processor. Get a copy of the N F U’s milk supplier contract, adapt it to your purposes and present it to your buyer. And in parallel, have an informal chat with other potential purchasers about how much they would like to buy your milk.
If you’ve ever tried renegotiating a mobile phone deal, it’s amazing what you can get by suggesting that a rival provider is offering better terms. But going back to Moors Farmer, you wouldn’t expect “somebody” to do that deal for you, would you?
Best wishes.
Phil Christopher
References:
[1] Martin Samuel, 22 August 2007. Rich cannot get richer without help from friends. The Times, p58.
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
Aquaculture and environment
Here's something I wrote recently for one of my clients.
Sustainable future for aquaculture needs knowledge gap closing on nutrient requirements, deficiencies and toxicity
As the fastest growing food production sector in the world, aquaculture faces ever-closer scrutiny of it’s impact on the environment, according to Dr Santosh Lall of the National Research Council’s Institute for Marine Biosciences,
Dr Lall was addressing the inaugural Organic Trace Elements for Animal Nutrition and the Environment symposium, OTEANE 2007, held recently in
“Aquaculture now ranks fourth in terms of global farmed meat supply, with approximately 195 species of fish being cultivated,” said Dr Lall. “The sector’s environmental impact has so far been associated mainly with intensive systems for carnivorous marine fish and salmonids cultured in raceways and cages.
“This includes discharge of suspended solids – faeces and waste feed – antibiotics and other drugs, disinfectants and algaecides, and other chemical compounds leached into water. The mineral and organic enrichment of water causes the build up of anoxic sediments, alteration of seabed fauna and flora, and eutrophication.”
To minimise the adverse effects of these factors, Dr Lall said the past two decades had seen significant efforts through changes is feed formulation, better nutrition strategies, improved practices and stringent environmental regulations. But he stressed that much more would be needed in the future.
Micro- as well as macro-emissions from aquaculture are increasingly under the spotlight, not only in scientific and industry circles, but also in the wider public domain. Only four months ago, the New Scientist published an article that began: “Pollution far below the level seen as dangerous for aquatic life has nevertheless dramatically altered animal behaviour in North American lakes. Heavy metals [ie trace elements] are knocking out the sense of smell in organisms from bacteria to fish. Even we may not be immune.”[1]
At concentration levels of copper as low as two parts per billion, the report said the sense of smell in salmon was impaired, with potentially fatal consequences through being unable to detect the presence of a nearby predator.
The OTEANE symposium’s focus being on trace elements, Dr Lall pointed out that in general carnivorous finfish diets contained a high proportion of fish meal and marine by-products, supplemented with trace elements at a higher concentration that required due to limited information on requirements and bio-availability.
“These feeds are supplemented with copper, zinc, iron, manganese, selenium, iodine and phosphorus,” he said. “Elevated levels of copper, zinc and manganese have been found in sediments under sea cages and in solid waste generated by land-based fish farms. These minerals have a wide range of effects on seabed fauna and flora, particularly in their reproduction, recruitment success and survival.”
The contemporary relevance of this for governments and policy-makers was outlined by Dr Paul Römkens from
In farmed terrestrial and aquatic species alike, a key issue for minimising the environmental footprint of trace element supplementation is increased bioavailability and lower supplementation levels, explained president of the organising committee and director of the Pancosma minerals division Stéphane Durosoy. “This is the raison d’etre of the Oteane symposium,” he said.
A problem facing aquaculture, according to Dr Lall, is that major gaps exist in the knowledge of mineral requirements, their physiological functions, and the bio-availability of trace elements from mineral supplements and feed ingredients.
“For some fish species, dietary requirements have been reported for six trace elements: Copper, zinc, iron, manganese, iodine and selenium. But none has been published for shrimps or crustaceans.”
| Table 1: Published* trace element requirements for fish (reviewed by Lall) | |
| Trace element | Dietary requirement (ppm) |
| Copper | 1 – 5 |
| Zinc | 15 – 40 |
| Iron | 30 – 170 |
| Manganese | 2 – 20 |
| Iodine | 1 – 4 |
| Selenium | 0.15 – 0.5 |
In terrestrial animals, the potential for reducing trace element supplementation was presented by Professor Klaus Männer from
The extent to which this applies to fish nutrition is not known so clearly. But it is apparent, according to Dr Lall, that the tipping point from trace element deficiency to excess is much more knife edge in fish than land animals. He explained how fish have unique physiological mechanisms to absorb and retain minerals from their diets and water through both the gills and the gut.
“Although mineral uptake by the fish gill from water has been an area of active research, there have been few studies on the absorption of trace elements from the gut,” he said. “What we do know is that excessive mineral intake via gills or gut can cause toxicity and therefore a fine nutritional balance between deficiency and surplus is vital if aquatic organisms are to maintain homeostasis.“However, insufficient knowledge of trace element requirements and metabolism render it difficult to make reliable predictions of macro-mineral and trace element deficiency or toxicity. The signs of deficiency in fish include reduced growth and anorexia, bone mineralization and skeletal deformity, fin erosion, lens cataracts and muscular dystrophy.”
It is a commonplace recommendation in research reports that ‘more research should be carried out’. This would be particularly well-justified in this field of scientific endeavour if Dr Lall and his aquaculture colleagues are to accumulate the detailed knowledge base necessary to improve the environmental sustainability of this fastest growing area of meat production globally.
-ends-
[~960 words]
[1] Aria Pearson, April 2007. 'Safe' heavy metals hit fish senses. NewScientist.com news service, 18:16 09. http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11559-safe-heavy-metals-hit-fish-senses.html
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)