The Rural Voice, 1992-06, Page 27evaluations ever undertaken. Weaner
pigs from each source were raised
under similar conditions at the
university. They were put under
intense scrutiny with some of the best
equipment money could buy. Feed
conversion was monitored.
Equipment for Eve animal
measurement was used. More than
300 measures were made on each
animal.
The animals were slaughtered at
various weights, 55 lb., 100 Ib., three
groupings in the 100-200 range,
several more groups in the 200-300
range and a group at 330 lb.
Carcasses were measured carefully,
testing both the quality of the animal
and the accuracy of the measuring
equipment used on the live animals.
Even the blood from each animal was
weighed and analyzed to see if there
were characteristics that set off the
best animals from the ordinary.
The Canadian animals, Warren
Stein says with just a hint of pride,
were superior on lean percentage and
lean gain to the American hogs.
Colour photos on a display in the
Thames Bend board -room show a cut
from a Stein pig in the study with a
thin layer of fat over a large muscle,
compared to a huge slice of fat on an
American counterpart.
Canadian pigs, Stein points out,
generally go to market at about 220
pounds compared to 280 for their
American counterparts, but the 220
pound Canadian carcasses still had as
many pounds of lean meat as the 280
pound U.S. animals. What's more,
Stein says, "Our pigs can be taken to
270-280 pounds and still be lean."
Warren Stein says he and Richard
and the 16 employees at Thames
Bend can take credit for diligence in
applying the information available
from the Canadian record of
performance testing system, but all
Canadians can take pride in having
those programs in place to
allow for the advances in
genetics.
The difference between
American and Canadian
pork production can be
traced back to our history, he
says. Canada was in the two World
Wars before the Americans. With
Britain at war in 1914, the Canadian
government, packers and farmers got
together to decide how to meet the
challenge of feeding both Britain and
Bend Purdue Unv
noes
CARCASS AND WE
ANIMAL EVALUATION
Ailey ?( dor WIMP
MLA
the millions of troops. The British
knew what they expected a pig to be
and the Canadian industry teamed up
to meet those needs.
"It gave us a legacy of working
together and programs that allowed
us to manipulate production," Stein
says. In World War II the same
teamwork was in evidence as four out
of five pigs produced in Canada were
exported (with the side effect that
after both wars Canadian pork
producers suffered through too much
production capacity for the reduced
markets).
Marlow Gingerich, a young
Centralia College grad from Zurich,
shows the latest weapons Thames
Bend puts to work in the name of
genetic improvement. A cart contains
a television monitor and a strange,
curved wand. It's an ultra sound
machine, identical to the kind used in
hospitals to study unborn children in
their mother's womb. Here though,
the machine is used to look through
Iwo
Warren Stein shows photos from the
Purdue University study.
are recorded on a video tape.
The tapes arc taken into the office
where they're played back through a
tape -player into a computer. The
images are stopped at the standard
measuring points and the computer
measures the back -fat thickness and,
in some cases, the muscle mass. Later
that information is key -boarded into a
Lotus 1-2-3 program of record
keeping. Again, the records of about
25 pigs can be entered in an hour.
The information allows Thames Bcnd
to get information that in the past
wouldn't have been available until an
animal had been slaughtered.
***
Warren Stein feels a sense of
excitement about his business, even
after 25 years of building it to thc
way it is today. "Nobody else is
doing what we're doing today."
The new technology available to
breeders like Thames Bend today is
one of the greatest tools in
improving breeding
programs. "You do
something for 25 years and
make progress and all of a
sudden it's like falling into
Alice's Wonderland,"
Stein says of thc high-tech world now
available.
He knows something about
changing technology and its effect on
genetics. Genetic selection took a
great leap forward in thc 1980s when
Two
industry a legacy of co-ooperation
World Wars gave the Canadian pork
the skin of pigs and see just how
much lean meat and fat there is.
Thames Bend staff take ultra -sound
measurements in three places on gilts
and five places on boars, recording
about 25 pigs in an hour. The images
JUNE 1992 23