Ag Secretary Perdue voices concerns with ultra-filtered milk trade to Ag Minister MacAulay

Jun 06, 2017

Much of the discussions revolved around trade relationships

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

Ultra-filtered milk trade highlighed the conversations between U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Canadian Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay during their first official meeting on June 5 in Toronto.

Other discussion topics included NAFTA, but Perdue voiced his concerns with Canada's Class 7 designation and the potential impact it could have on the U.S. dairy industry.

“…I made it very clear that the Class 7 designation we felt was an unfair undercutting of the U.S. industry that grew up south of the U.S.-Canada border,” Secretary Perdue said in a June 5 release.

Photo: Sonny Perdue/Twitter

“It cut these (American) producers and this industry out of shipping the ultra-filtered milk into their (Canadian) cheese industry, which was in demand in Canada. I also said, if you want to manage your dairy supply with supply management, that’s fine. You just need to manage it and not overproduce to create a glut of milk solids on the world market that’s being dumped at unfair prices.”

Minister MacAulay outlined Canada’s commitment to working with the U.S. Administration to help the agricultural trade relationship, worth US$47 billion in 2016, flourish.

"I look forward to working closely with Secretary Perdue and the new U.S. Administration to further strengthen our important agricultural relationship,” Minister MacAulay said in a June 5 statement.

“Canada will continue to develop our ties with the U.S. in areas including trade, science, regulations and the environment. I'm confident that we can reinforce this relationship in a balanced manner, allowing us to boost farmers' bottom lines and create good, middle class jobs on both sides of the border."

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”