26/11/13: Cereal crop collaboration; China to let market decide grain prices; Soy-yeast supplement for piglet feed

Agri-technology company Arcadia Biosciences, USA  and hybrid seed developer DuPont Pioneer, USA have announced a collaboration to develop enabling technology to help manage pollen flow in sorghum.

Mostly used for food, animal feed, and a variety of industrial applications around the world, sorghum is grown on approximately 100 million acres globally.

The collaboration will grant Arcadia exclusive rights to develop specified Pioneer technology for use in grain, forage, sweet, and biofuel sorghum types.

Full news available here...

Grain and crop prices will soon be decided by the market rather than the Chinese government. 

This was the message published today in the Economic Times of India, following original publication in the China Economic Times, China's leading business newspaper.

Since 2004, with the aim of protecting farmers' margins and encouraging output, Beijing has set prices for rice and wheat, and stockpiled corn, soybeans, sugar and cotton at fixed-prices, the newspaper noted. 

"Grain prices have come to the stage to be decided by the market," said Fang Yan, head of rural department of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) speaking to the China Economic Times. 

Full story available here...

The Department of Animal Science, the agriculture research division of the University of Arkansas, USA recently studied the effect of a new supplement for use in piglet feed. 

Developed by Hamlet Protein, a global supplier of soya protein products for the animal feed industry, HP 800 Booster is a soy-yeast supplement developed specifically to boost the food intake of underweight piglets.

According to Hamlet Protein, the unique co-processing of soy and yeast delivers a good combination of nutritious proteins and low levels of anti-nutritional factors. 

As part of the study of 238 weaned piglets, the Department of Animal Science noted that even when HP 800 Booster was no longer included in the diet, the piglets fed the supplement at an earlier stage continued to gain more in weight – at significantly lower feed costs.

Visit Hamlet Protein's website here....

View a PDF version of the HP 800 Booster brochure here...

Piglets in a pigpen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)