Pasture Based Swine Management

Submitted by Eve H. Honeycutt

Extension Livestock Agent, Lenoir

and Greene Counties

Adapted from an article by

 Dr. D.W. Kennedy, Arkansas State University

    Pasture-Based Swine  management (PBSM) is an alternative approach for raising swine outdoors using pasture as a major source of nutrients, particularly for gestating sows. Compared with confinement or indoor systems for raising hogs, the PBSM approach can offer the producer lower initial costs, lower production costs, and a sustainable method for producing pork. Because these systems require no expensive buildings and waste handling equipment, farmers can feasibly

down-size or expand their operation depending on prevailing market conditions.

Environmental and Social Issues
     There are environmental and social issues that will continue to have an impact on confinement operations. Compared with pigs raised indoors, pasture systems significantly reduce problems associated with animal-rights groups, health of operators, and environmental concerns associated with dust, odor, and waste disposal. Pasture-based systems have a "built-in" waste management system because hogs disperse their waste over the land as they graze.
     The main two ingredients in conventional swine diets are corn and soybean meal. Often, these crops are managed as continuous row-crop production using potentially ground-water contaminating pesticides and fertilizers. Pasturing hogs reduces the reliance on corn and soybean production because forage crops will meet a portion of their daily nutrient needs.

 
Site Selection and Layout
     One of the most important decisions to be made is where to locate a pasture-based system. An area of land should be chosen that is well-drained and large enough to accommodate herd size. A land requirement of four to six sows per acre is a good place to start, but if pasture is to be utilized as feed, this stocking rate may need to be decreased.  The layout of paddocks will vary due to size of the herd, soil type, topography, and land area available. A minimum number of paddocks should be constructed to accommodate the different management phases (gestation, farrowing, nursery, etc.). If pastures are to be utilized, the number of paddocks will vary depending on frequency of pasture rotation. Pasture rotation will help maintain the pasture stand, nutrient quality of the pasture, and reduce damage of pasture due to rooting. Furthermore, the layout of the system will depend a lot on personal preference. A wagon-wheel design may fit the area and can lower labor needs because the distance traveled when rotating hogs among paddocks is reduced.

Fencing Options
     Power or electric fencing is a low-cost alternative to conventional fencing. The low-cost and ease of installation has contributed greatly to the increased popularity of producing hogs outdoors.    

     High-tensile, 12.5 gauge steel wire is widely used because of its affordability and durability. A two-strand fence will suffice for most situations. However, more strands or a netting may be needed for young pigs.

Shelters and Shade
     Some type of shelter should be provided during each stage of production. There are many designs available for each type of shelter. Factors to consider when selecting a shelter type include: cost, use, construction skills required, and personal preference. Adequate space for dry sows is 12 to 16 square feet per sow or boar. An individual hut should be provided for each sow during farrowing. Any of several designs can be used.

Nutrition and Feeding
     Over 50% of the total cost of producing hogs will be feed costs. Remember, no one feed ingredient can provide all the nutrients swine need on a daily basis. Although, most swine diets are based on corn and soybean meal, a wide variety of feeds exists that are suitable for hogs.

     Pasture-based swine systems take advantage of the sow's excellent grazing ability to lower the cost of feeding. However, not all pastures will be suitable for sows. Pastures should be young, tender, high in protein, and low in fiber. Clovers and annual grasses such as wheat, oats, rye, and ryegrass make excellent forages for sows during the cooler months of the year. Rotationally grazing these pastures will help ensure that maximum productivity of pastures is achieved. Rotationally grazing sows helps maintain pastures at a young, tender stage of growth and helps avoid excessive trampling and rooting of pastures. Good-quality pasture can be used to replace 50% of the grain and supplement needs during gestation.

Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

Webmaster Level: All

The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.

This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.

How to submit a URL
First, use Diagnostics > Fetch As Googlebot to fetch the URL you want to submit to Google. If the URL is successfully fetched you’ll see a new “Submit to index” link appear next to the fetched URL.
Once you click “Submit to index” you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to choose whether you want to submit only the one URL, or that URL and all its linked pages.
When submitting individual URLs, we have a maximum limit of 50 submissions per week; when submitting URLs with all linked pages, the limit is 10 submissions per month. You can see how many submissions you have left on the Fetch as Googlebot page. Any URL submitted should point to content that would be suitable for Google Web Search, so if you're trying to submit images or videos you should use Sitemaps instead.

Submit URLs to Google without verifying
In conjunction with this update to Fetch as Googlebot, we've also updated the public "Add your URL to Google" form. It's now the Crawl URL form. It has the same quota limits for submitting pages to the index as the Fetch as Googlebot feature but doesn't require verifying ownership of the site in question, so you can submit any URLs that you want crawled and indexed.

Note that Googlebot is already pretty good about finding and crawling new content in a timely fashion, so don’t feel obligated to use this tool for every change or update on your site. But if you’ve got a URL whose crawling or indexing you want to speed up, consider submitting it using the Crawl URL form or the updated Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. Feel free to comment here or visit our Webmaster Help Forum if you have more detailed questions.

Written by Jonathan Simon & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Beautiful Lies with Audrey Tautou

Sweltering though the evenings may be I am not one to turn down a screening after work especially when it's the latest film featuring Audrey Tautou, Beautiful Lies. So Monday night saw myself and the Editor of Beautyandthedirt sitting in a comfortable screening room with a glass of pink wine and a crisp to see the latest offering from French Director Pierre Salvadori (director of the extremely funny Priceless).

Due to hit a cinema near you (with English subtitles), Beautiful Lies is the story of a provincial hairdresser Emilie (Tautou) who runs her hair and beauty salon and doesn't like to take 'no' for an answer. When Arab handyman Jean is discovered to speak five languages fluently and isn't what he seems, she is put on the back foot and immediately fires him. Why she does this is unclear but seems to be a running theme throughout the film.

Emilie is unaware that Jean, played by Sami Bouajila whose performance is soulful and measured, is madly in love with her and writes her an anonymous letter stating his feelings. She copies this out and sends it to her depressed mother (Nathalie Baye who played Leonardo di Caprio's mum in Catch Me If You Can) who has been abandoned by her father some four years previously. This is where the fun begins with misunderstandings and mistakes worthy of a Shakespeare play only just keeping to the sane side of farce.

Although I didn’t exactly fall in love with the female characters myself, this film is fun to watch. Shot on location somewhere in the South of France it’s a light-weight girly movie that does leave you with a few ponderables. Why is it okay for the romantic lead to be used as a chattle between the libido’s (one strong the other non-existant) of mother and daughter, and why does no-one question the morality closer (I’m not giving too much away if I say mum sleeps with romantic lead). Only in France I suppose...

Go with your best girlfriends, sisters, mum – leave boyfriend or husband behind, I really don’t think he’ll like it unless he’s a little in love with Audrey Tautou himself.


Check out the trailer here...

Release date August 12^th 2011, certificate 12a, running time 104 mins.

Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read how a small team took a successful grassroots approach to helping businesses advertise online. - Ed.

In early 2010, I was talking with some friends from Google’s India office about how to help small, local businesses advertise online. We found that small business owners the world over had a key commonality: very little time. We decided to tackle this problem head on, with the hopes of making the advertising process quicker and easier for small businesses.

My colleagues in India flew out to our headquarters in California, and we teamed up with a Google Maps product manager who had some first hand experience working with small business owners. One of his friends ran a small mountain clothing store in New Hampshire called The Mountain Goat of Hanover, which had just moved to town. She was responsible for staffing, bookkeeping, inventory management and many other time-intensive tasks—all with very little help. She had the desire to try promoting her business online, but learning to manage a new form of advertising wasn’t something she had time for.

Kendra Dynok, manager of The Mountain Goat of Hanover, helps a customer.

The Mountain Goat of Hanover was our first case study, but it seemed like any interaction we had with a small business led to a conversation about how it advertised. A photographer in Virginia, a San Francisco dentist and a contractor re-doing my kitchen all told the same story: Online advertising should be simpler.

What all of these business owners needed was advertising that was measurable, affordable and quick. While they could use AdWords, they needed something even faster: a tool that they could set up easily and then walk away from, trusting that their advertising would be managed efficiently.

A handful of us started building a new tool for advertisers that met these requirements and within a few weeks, we were beta testing it with the owner of The Mountain Goat, the photographer, the dentist and the contractor—inviting more small businesses as interest grew. We literally went door to door in San Francisco and Chicago, asking local businesses if our tool could help them advertise better. Soon, we had more than 50 businesses testing the new ads product and within a few months, that number was over 2,000.

Our team runs somewhat like the small businesses with which we work. We’re a small, close-knit group of friends that spend most of our time huddled in a room making decisions on the spot and moving fast to launch a product in a matter of months. By the end of 2010, we’d launched our tool, which we called Google Boost at the time, in 25 cities across five states. And just last week, we officially launched AdWords Express to all businesses in the U.S. We would never have been able to do that outside of Google, where we were able to leverage the existing AdWords system, infrastructure and dedicated teams. By making it easier for people to implement effective advertising campaigns, we’ve been able to bring tens of thousands of small businesses online—and we’ve only just begun.

Posted by Xuefu Wang, Tech Lead and Manager, AdWords Express

Calling from Gmail now in 38 languages, with lower rates to over 150 destinations

We’re always trying to make it easier for people to connect—whether that means sending an email, chatting or video chatting, you can reach the people you care about from right inside Gmail. Last year, we made it possible for those of you in the U.S. to call any mobile phone or landline directly from Gmail and starting today, we are making this available to many more of you who use Gmail outside the U.S. by offering calling in 38 new languages.



You can now buy calling credit in your choice of four currencies (Euros, British pounds, Canadian dollars or U.S. dollars) and there are no connection fees, so you only pay for the time you talk.

To help reduce the cost of staying connected, we’re also lowering our calling rates to over 150 destinations around the world. For example, it’s now only $0.10 (or €0.08) per minute to call mobile phones in the U.K., France or Germany (landlines are $0.02/min), $0.15/minute to call mobile phones in Mexico and $0.02/min to call any phone number in China and India. The complete list is available on our rates page.

We’re rolling out this feature over the next few days, so if it’s available in your country you’ll see a little green phone icon show up at the top of your chat list and you’ll be ready to make calls (you’ll need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you're a Google Apps user, your domain administrator must have Google Voice and Google Checkout enabled in the administrator control panel in order to be able to use this feature.

Calls to the U.S. or Canada placed within those countries will continue to be free at least for the rest of 2011. Calls to the U.S. or Canada placed from outside these countries will be charged $0.01 per minute (or €0.01, £0.01, C$0.01 per minute).

Posted by Pierre Lebeau, Product Manager, Gmail Team

Daftar Direktori Dofollow Pagerank Tinggi (3-8) | Blog Submission Sites

Pengen blog punya traffic tinggi? Pengen punya pengunjung/pembaca blog yang jumlahnya terus membludak? Mendaftarkan blog ke direktori blog merupakan salah satu usaha link building yang bertujuan meningkatkan SEO blog. Selain itu, blog yang terdaftar di berbagai direktori juga mendapatkan kesempatan traffic/visitor dari direktori-direktori tersebut. Maka keuntungan traffic akan berlipat: Traffic

A Day Out at Thorpe Park

Okay so I don't do big rides, or crowds, or pretty appalling fast-food chains. I'm a bit of a snob I confess and would rather take a trip to Shaw's Corner followed by a pub lunch somewhere out in the Hertfordshire countryside. But occasionally I have to bite the bullet, slap on the suncream and head, along with about 30,000 other people, to a British theme park. This is because I have teenagers and so does my sister and we love them so very much that we have to bribe them into wanting a day out with us by choosing the sort of day out they will first and foremost love and we can just about bear.

Well yesterday was one such day, so off the 8 of us trotted to Thorpe Park and I must confess I learnt a few things.

1) I learnt that my sister is a closet adrenalin junkie and will go on all the REALLY big and fast rides putting me to shame.

2) Even my cynicism was left at the entrance gate and the first time I heard the menacing music played out over the loud speakers I felt a thrill of excitement.

3) I really, really love big splashy water rides where you get absolutely soaked.

4) You should always go for the trusted brands in terms of fast-food in these places. I opted for fish and chips- absolutely disgusting and partially cooked (they were cold in the middle- yuck). My girls chose Burger King which is standard fare but at least you know what your getting.

5) My husband is also a closet adrenalin junkie and joins my sister in putting me to shame.

6) Thank God for my brother-in-law who is a big wimp like me and is happy to hold the bags and sunglasses while the others go on the white-knuckle rides.

7) You do need to get there at 9.30am to beat the big queues - my sister insisted, I resisted, thankfully she won and we got to go on rides before the queues became 60mins long.

8) Ben and Jerry's makes a perfect substitute to lunch when you've been badly let down by the fish and chips.

Here is a taste of what I am proud to say my sister, husband and the teenagers took on....

Colossus - one of the Top 10 roller-coasters in the world apparently.

The infamous Saw.

And this was my favourite ride - Logger's Leap

And here, dear friends, is the state of me afterwards...

And Thorpe Park itself? Good points are they have a wide selection of fast, scary rides and because it's smaller than Alton Towers there's not so much walking to do. For families with small children there is very little - I'd go up the road to Legoland at Windsor. It was a bit grubby and careworn which considering it's the start, and not the end, of the season is pretty poor, and the food selection is also poor. It is really easy to get to being just off the M25 and near to Staines station (there's a shuttle bus apparently). Above all, if you like theme parks, it's FUN!