News from the Midwest Sectional Meetings, March 16-18, 1998, Des Moines, Iowa
Contacts:
Jennifer Baker, writer, Ohio State University (330)
202-3503
Hog Heaven: Pigging Out on Potato Chips
Ever wonder if Porky Pig had a favorite snack food?
The hogs at Ohio State’s Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI) do, and they don’t care whether it’s sour cream and onion, or barbecue-flavored. All potato chips are equal in their opinion.
Sha Rahnema is a professor at ATI. The students in his animal research practices class initiated a new activity. The goal: find an alternative to corn feedstuffs. To do this, the students found a food that is both high in energy. Now, two and a half years after the study began, over 250 pigs have been finished on a pelleted feed in which 10 to 20 percent of the corn was replaced with potato chips. Chips are very high in energy. Why? Just ask any dieter: potato chips are 33 percent fat.
The project began about two years ago when corn prices were sky-high, Rahnema said. The students were to find a substitute source of energy. Their solution was to feed the pigs potato chips.
A couch potato could be so lucky.
The students were involved in designing the experiment, they determined how many animals would be used in the study and chose the statistical design. They were directly involved in measuring weight gains and feed conversions.
Shearer’s Potato Chips in Brewster donated their potato chip scraps to the project. Potato chips scraps are the chips nobody wants, off-color, burnt, the runts of the litter. These scraps are hauled from Brewster to the feed mill at OARDC’s Wooster campus where they are added to the pigs’ feed ration and pelleted.
Rahnema and another ATI professor, Ron Borton, are analyzing the effects the chips have on the pigs. "We’ve found the carcass characteristics to be unchanged. Feed intake was reduced because of the high fat and energy content, increasing the feed efficiency," Rahnema said. "The only difference so far, is that it took 10 to 14 days longer to finish the pigs on the 20 and 25 percent potato chip diet."
Whether the pigs watched more television wasn’t studied.
Rahnema said Shearers must dispose of approximately 4,000 pounds of potato chip scrap each week. The ATI pigs used in the study consume six tons of feed every two weeks. They add only 600-900 pounds of chips per week to the feed.
Rahnema sees this project as a viable alternative for hog producers. Manufacturers must dispose of these products. Using them as a feedstuff has beneficial results, and it’s a better alternative than dumping in landfills. He said many commercial hog finishers are experimenting with alternatives to corn for energy in their feed.
"I think there is a very good possibility that these alternatives will become more commonplace," he said. "Pretzels are used in some cases. Bigger companies can get a better representative sample of how these energy supplements effect the animals. They can pick up a week’s worth of rejected chips and mix them up to get a consistent product."
Rahnema doesn’t recommend throwing your stale chips into the feed trough, but he does feel alternative practices will be economical solutions for the future.
And if you have any doubts, just ask the pigs. They think "diversity" is great with or without a cool-ranch dip.
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