IsaanAussie

Thanks for padding up KJ. Never met a pig yet that didnt sense an honest heart. Lovely picture. The difference with dogs is a dog would lick the kid. Wish I could get my hands on some decent ringlock mesh here.

On the attachment front the answer is yes, but it can change. I have a sow that had a rectal prolapse as a young pig. That is her bum fell out. She was the perfect breeding candidate so I took the chance and got the vets in to fix it. Took them three tries but all was well. She recovered and was put back in the pen with her three sisters that were to become a breeding group. They belted her up something terrible and her ears got badly chewed resulting in cauliflower ears and her name "Ears". Ever since she has been a submissive sow in the group, until today. Three of the four had litters weaned and the last litter weaned this morning. The biggest sister returned and Ears did not greet her kindly. I tried all the soft stuff ways but ended up showing her just who the "Big" pig is. Yeap, ME. You want a pushing ans shoving match? Try this. Try Khun Jai Ron and his boney knees in your control point while he F's and blinds at the top of his voice. Message understood and all four were asleep as a group when I came home tonight

Dave, couldn't open the file. Still trying to get waves like yours to form on my pond. Got close with a very large catfish surfacing yesterday that sent an inch high ripple across the surface.

my wife just sold some of ours at 50bht, and as for dont sell,,lol so we just keep them and feed them even more expencive food, you must have the best pigs in thailand to be getting 65bht,,

jake good luck to you, we still do ok

Reality is a strange bed fellow Jake. If 50 baht is all you can get, then you really dont have a choice. I have developed alternate markets so I dont get stuck with pigs that are just getting bigger, but I have been there before and know exactly what you mean. I held piglets to fill orders for restaurants that didnt happen until after the pigs had past the weights required when I had good orders for them weaned. It is a business not a romance...

Maybe it has something to do with cost and availability. Unfortunately there is not a lot of rice growing going on around here. If I was able to get 40 tonnes delivered at 500 Bt per tonne, then I can assure you that I would use it as mulch. Don't think that is possible though.

If you ever get that deal, then cut me in too. We have our straw baled after threshing. It costs 15 baht per bale and I suppose they weigh 15 kgs each. So lets say there would be 60 bales per tonne, 900 baht just to bale it.

Its diffcult for me to give much credence to price/kilo for livestock just due to the variance in grade of livestock and other factor which affect price.. In the real world we normally sold livestock via auction barns and and prices could vary by quite large ranges (6-+ baht/kilo) depending on finish, health, weight, etc of the animals..Color of the animals can even enter the price for some buyers.

The REAL world, I remember that place too. Where was that?

Things are changing here but it is still a wet market, weddings and funerals type customer base here for most people involved in pigs in rural areas. The wet market meat is not hung through rigormortis but is sold fresh kill in small pieces out of an icebox at best. Weddings and funerals are a back yard kill and straight into the pot. I only have a few local customers that come to us for a quality based purchase, for most pork is pork. Money is a lot harder to find than a pig.

I have some niche market western customers who define what they are looking for and sales are based on achieving those goals. Contract farmers who are linked into the major supply networks are paid based on meeting targets for the pigs.

You might want to look at my comments on a chipper that I bought and then got returned.

Pond Life is still struggling with his.

Did some time ago. Thanks but this is a long time happening deal and the machine is not a toy. This is a 22HP diesel powered chipper as well as a hammermill that lets me grind down below 1mm particle sizes. It has a suction fan and cyclone attached. I am buying 5 different sized screens as part of the package. Again, having been bitten before as well, thanks for the warning.

Local guys now buying at 47 bath/kilo. Official farm price 57 on swinethailand. Has the price dropped that steep in the last month? And isn't it very early on the year for the prices tobe that low.

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Revar,

Understand what you are looking at. The industry body numbers are based on regional "official trading" numbers not individual farm gate prices. Here it is the price that the official slaughterhouse pays.

Second point, here is Isaan is rain fed rice planting and fertilising season not much pork being bought and a way off to lent.

Third point, I wish anyone good luck if they can stay in business at 47 baht. There are always two answers, yes and no. Guess which one I would give? To tell you the truth it would be neither, I would advise the prospective buyer to go do something fundamental to his left shoe!

Where we are near Korat I never see anyone use to keep weeds down they just spend all day weeding and let the straw rot in a pile in the rice paddy I do see them use on spring onions they do feed to cattle but this is very poor feed I had 30head of cattle but that is why I sold them regards Russell

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If you have ever tried to grub out some of the weeds here you will know the reason why. Some of those really tenancious suckers have roots as long as your arm and they will push through almost any mulch. On short growing season crops it is OK but past a few months the weeds are back.

Around me the Thais dont pull weeds, at best they "cut the grass" or they poison it. I admit to being very tempted to pull out the chemical hoe on some weed patches I would rather not have. One thing that has worked for me is to pump the sediment from the pigs septic tanks onto the weeds. They dont come back quickly then. The seed load in the ground is all but eliminated. Burn you illegitimate sons of weeds, you!

Hi Russ,

The straw is used to feed local cattle and buffalos during the rice season when there is little pasture. To store it during the wet it is built into stacks in the open and some now bale it and store under cover.

As a mulch it is great but decomposes very quickly. As a soil builder it is spectacular as it is full of fungus and bacteria native to the area. Ours often has straw mushroom spores in it that produce at this time of year. I use it baled to form raised garden beds. As soon as they get wet they start to decompose adding to the humus and the biology. The soil/compost mix in the beds and the bordering straw are then combined and you have some great "real" soil after less than one wet season.

You can soak a bale in an EM solution and then place it on the ground covered with plastic and you have bokashi in days.

Thanks for the dialogue. Where did you find your machine Aussie Battler?

Sorry but look back a few posts.

ewamoon,

have a lookon alibaba.com theres loads of them on there, from 500dollers up, ok youll have to inport it but at that price it cant be bad,

take care jake

Oh yes it can, take care is the word.

http://en.engormix.com/MA-aquaculture/articles/growth-performance-of-nile-tilapia-using-probiotics-t1711/p0.htm

Anyone who has followed my pigs 101 posts will know that my latest "best" thing is probiotics. So I decided to check what the effect on Tilapia would be. If you have the time check out this link. How would you like to improve the FCR of your fish by 7% simply by including a probiotic in their feed?

I was going to hold this back a while longer but I thought why? This is what it is all about. Now I know that what I am doing for the pigs has very valuable application to fish.

Ok a couple of answers. Firstly, Ray after we spoke I rang the formulation guy and asked why the protein level was higher for fingerlings than fry, but why did it cost less? Now, if anyone can give me a better answer, please do. What he said was it was due to the smaller size extruder plate and the higher pressure needed to form the pellet, this resulted in a nett protein loss.

On the issue of reduce fat as well as protein, look at the reduction in the two expensive components, fish oil and fish meal, both decrease. One suggestion made to me was to use palm oil. That I want to check out because I recently found out that some pig feeds actually use vegetable protein instead of animal protein and it has an adverse effect on piglets. Dont know about fish. In any case purchased fish meal and oil is on the must reduce cost list as soon as possible, not just for fish but also my pigs.

Last issue logistics cost. This is a big one but there are solutions, start by saying that if the ingredients can be farm produced or even value added raw materials then the cost savings would cover the usual per bag freight costs. I have a friend in pigs who buys feed direct from the factory and they ship it via their subcontractor to him for 10 baht a bag. It can be done.

Roll it all into one guys, if the answer was easy or didnt involve a bit of extra work, then someone would have done it already.

Edit: Forgot the rice bran question. I am using high grade bran which varies between 14 and 17% protein levels and I cannot remember the fat content but it is oil rich.

I have started a new crop of duckweed on the pond to see how high I can bump the protein levels. It seems promising as the fertilising water comes from the exit pits from the septic system on the pig sty. What makes that interesting is the probiotic mud balls that I use in the tanks. They break down the nitrogen into elemental amino acids and should be completely availble to the duckweed.

If it works then I can replace the soy meal completely and gain a higher protein level whilst reducing the fibre.

ray23 ... thanks for asking, currently I'm located in my Study on the Gold Coast, Australia.

The view about 10 mins from my home

OH ... now I understand ... you wanted to know about IsaanAussie's location ...

Spaniel, welcome to the topic ...

Wow that fish pond of yours is huge Dave! Mate it has waves on it! Puts my little puddle to shame. However I seem to have had more luck growing grass of the same <deleted> soil as you have.

Yeah, that is a tough one to come to terms with. It has taken me years to just accept it the way it should be done. Nar, I'm not all the way there yet. But consider what happens on holidays when those working in the big smoke come home to the village. The smart ones bring only as much as they are prepared to hand over and within a day or two it is gone and that is the end of it. The rural people can get past with practical nothing, they just get on with it. It appears that money to a Thai is like vegemite to me, lovely to have but you can get by without it.

My advice is to ask the GF what she would do and follow what she says.

Here, one of the brothers is away working and the other just a village drunk. Every time the one that has a few bucks comes home he antes up when his brother asks but he gives the money to my wife to dispense as she sees fit. And believe me it doesnt get given out lightly. They do have a system and it seems to work.

Thanks for all the replies everyone you have been most helpful.

If you have a tractor then there are companies here that make single row and upwards planters for not much more than you would have to pay for a manual planter. If you have a rotary hoe, you can get a row making set of discs to attach to the hoe, and I see no reason why a planter/fertiliser box couldnt be mounted on that. Do it all at once.

Of course there is always the Thai way, a sharpened bamboo pole and a cloth bag full of seeds and get some exercise in.

Most rice merchants store the bulk rice in concrete boxes in sheds. Mostly to do with the handling equipment available, more to the point not available. Large front end loaders and trucks is about it. The large rice mills are about the first place you will find grain elevators etc.. At farm level the largest container is still humped manually so it is a 50kg sack.

But things are changing. It was not so long ago that you rarely saw a combine around here but now they are harvesting more each year. The harvesters are also evolving from bags to bulk. That may well mean more larger volumes but access into the farms to load large trucks and road loading limitations still remain issues now.

Another issue is the weather. For rain fed rice the wet season is over before harvest so even if the rice is wet it can be sun dried by most farmers. More grain dryers are slowly appearing at some of the intermediate sized mills.

Brian,

Many thanks for the lovely evening on Friday. Enjoy the sausages. See you again soon.

Perhaps I can help. "New" Seed rice is usually purchased after two or three seasons and is quite expensive. This year we still havent had enough rain to get the plough in the ground. There was no seed left in the grain merchants and we bought first season paddy rice paying 7,000 baht for 300Kg.

If this family has no transport they will have to pay someone to cart it as well. But work on the seed being around 24 baht a kg and 25 kg per rai needed to hand broadcast. If they buy in sacks of seed then for 5 rai, 5 sacks.

The process here is to spray the weeds a week before plough and planting. The herbicide comes in 5 litre jugs and we use i jug per 4 rai, The guy that sprays it brings the gear and dilutes and dispenses in 200 litre drums to use the chemicals up. He charges by the 200 litre drum sprayed.

My tractor is out of commission so we use a local guy who runs a plough that has a rake mounted as well so the process is to plough and rake the seed into the ground. I used to plough first and then rotary hoe, broadcast the seed and then rotary again.

Other prices are close to what TingTong has given and he is closer to the area in question.

As a general statement, the 20,000 baht sounds a pretty realistic budget to get the rice grown and harvested by a family that has no gear hence must pay others to do the work.

Remember they are Thai and you have to understand a bottle of whiskey before the workers start and when they finish is expected. Often meals are included and a trip to buy seed and chemicals has a cost as well. It is those extras that run the bill up.

If your friends money is tight then not all needs to be handed over at once. There is the preparation and planting, two fertiliser applications then harvesting spread over the three to five month growing period dependant on rice type. If you want a guess, then I would suggest 10K first, another 3 in a month then 7 at harvest should fix most methods of harvesting. But please take that with a heavy warning that it is only a guess.

Paying in stages stops the money "leeching" away on other things if you are not there to watch things, but Thai culture really dictates that you should hand it over and then butt out. That money, the way it is spent and the rice at the end belongs to the head of the family and dispersements are up to him.

I checked my bokashi heap today and it is still hot to the touch on the outside. Burrowing my hand inside, temperature seems pretty constant throughout. The rice husks have a much darker colour now. Most important, there is a white mould on the surface.

With it being hot, I'm not sure if I should leave this to carry on working or not. I had intended to use this first batch as mulch to see if it will not only suppress, but kill off growing weeds.

Oh well, it's all trial and error and I do quite enjoy experimenting.

The EM manual states the maximum temp should be 45C and the heap should be turned if it gets too hot. I tend to think it can get hotter but should turned. and the moisture level watched.

If it gets hot than it will tend to dry out, at below 30% moisture the microbes you have bred with become inactive and the pile will cool down.

My composting process is pretty much the same principle. If a starter box full does get too hot it dries pretty quickly. When I break it open it is full of white fungus (yeast), obviously still very much alive. I dont really care if the bacteria has died off a bit because a spray with EMA will get that back quickly enough and the pile usually reheats.

If you want to get the pH up a bit, then add some carbonised rice hulls or some lime or even both.

Only one key to my heart left unturned, vegemite. You want the red carpet treatment here, bring a jar.

David,

As we all know location here governs prices as does volumes etc.. Yes I have looked at many alternate products that I could buy but at "buyer beware" risk. Honestly, when I look at the whole thing the cost saving if there is one, isn't worth the extra effort. My plan is to replace the Normal stuff with equal to or better i can make myself and reduce cost that way, it will take time.

Anyway, I spent some up close and personal time with the local supplier yesterday and have updated the farm gate selling prices that I would be offering for Pla Nin feed.

For those interested, the price per kg is assuming a 20 or 30 kg bag. See attached update.

Tilapia feed 2.pdf

IA

I am looking for 40 to 45 kg Duroc pigs. Come up short for a customer so if I can get a couple it would help.

I have rerun the current prices and added the manufacturing cost to come up with 27 baht a kg for the fry blend, the most expensive. Substituting the alternate ingredients but at the same nutrient level I am aiming for about 21 baht. Or 420 baht a 20kg bag for fry feed. The others below that. Is that competitive?

IsaanAussie asks "420 baht a 20kg bag for fry feed ... Is that competitive?"

Mate I don't have the answer for you ... maybe others do.

The business man in me certainly says establish the selling market before production ... a 'back of the envelope' Business Plan.

David,

You have been busy with the posts. This is a new part of our business plan. The primary objective for me is to lower my pig feed bill. The ability to get more use out of the machinery on things like fish feed helps with the ROI. Take that a step further and the range of pellitised products we are targeting includes feed, fuel and fertilisers.

As most will know it is difficult to get higher than farm gate prices here for anything. I dont see that will change. But if I can lower my spending on retail buy-ins then things dont look so bad.

By the way I ran out of envelopes so I do most planning on the inside of old fag packets!

I have rerun the current prices and added the manufacturing cost to come up with 27 baht a kg for the fry blend, the most expensive. Substituting the alternate ingredients but at the same nutrient level I am aiming for about 21 baht. Or 420 baht a 20kg bag for fry feed. The others below that. Is that competitive?

IA Is the "fry blend" in powder form or ball.?

In powder form I found during trials that soy meal sinks out of the mix and is lost to the fish.

I use frog food which is about the size of hundreds and thousands (nonparells) for my fry then go to small ball feed (1-2 mm) as soon as they can handle it.

Your anticipated price of 420 is pretty good for 30% protein.

Checking the sizes of extruder plate now, I hope to get under 1mm balls.