Achievements
Our team participated in the 18th Annual Midwest Swine Nutrition Conference, on September 6, in Indianapolis, IN.
There were topics related to global animal agriculture, potential nutritional considerations to prevent sow mortality, impact of dietary amino acid balance on nitrogen and energy efficiency in sows, copper levels and sources for sows, nutritional regulation of piglet gut health, glutamine and transport stress, challenge of no antibiotic use compared to limited strategic antibiotic use, and development and nutritional value of advanced soybean products used in diets for young pigs.
This conference was directed toward the feed industry, consulting nutritionists, swine veterinarias, and producers. The speakers were Pablo Sherwell, Casey Bradley, Nathalie Trottier, Merlin Lindemann, Hans H. Stein, Sheila Jacobi, Brian Richert and Dean Boyd.
Personnel changes
On September 7, John K. Mathai successfully defended his Ph. D. dissertation on "Digestible Indispensable Amino Acids Scores for Food Proteins." He did a great job and now moved on to a job in Elanco.
Dr. Laia Blavi finished her time as a Post - doctoral research fellow and she went back to Barcelona, Spain to continue working in the industry.
Jen Roth worked in our team as a communication specialist since January 2010 - 2018. She had the responsibility of updating our web site, newsletter, podcasts, and other avenues. Jen left our lab in August 2018 to pursue a freelance career.
To celebrate their accomplishments and contributions, we had a little dinner for everyone. We will miss them, and we wish them all the best.
New experiments
Vanessa Lagos started an experiment on the effect of formulating diets based on a ratio between STTD Ca and STTD P and the inclusion of phytase on growth performance, plasma Ca and P, and bone ash of pigs from 11 to 130 kg.
Travel
On September 17, Carly Rundle and Hannah Bailey attended the Allen D. Leman Swine Conference, Minnesota. Also, Carly presented her poster about the "Effects of isoquinoline alkaloids on nutrient digestibility, energy metabolism, and growth performance of weaning gips".
On September 20 - 21, Dr. Hans H. Stein participated in the Feedworks Conference, Australia. There were topics related to recent research in the Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory and why digestible Ca and digestible P should be used in diet formulations.
On September 25 - 26, Dr. Hans H. Stein participated in the USSEC, Technical Updates: Second generation high energy and high protein soy products in Athens, Greece. The topics were the amazing soybean, soybean processing and how to avoid over processing, and value added soybean products for pigs.