Smelling of a clean home🧹

🧪 You know that smell when we’ve just finished cleaning our homes? If you do, chances are that you’re actually thinking about ammonia – an inorganic gas made of nitrogen and hydrogen (NH3) and commonly found in household cleaning products. 

⚠️ In swine production, however, ammonia is not so nice… Emissions come from the natural anaerobic breakdown of animal waste, often in a gaseous state and at a high pH. The problem is that exposure to high levels of ammonia within barns is a problem not only for employees' noses, but also for the immune systems and performance of pigs as well. 

💡 Fortunately, there are a number of ways to mitigate that, one of them being the use of higher dietary fiber levels. It has been shown that targeting greater fiber fermentation in the hindgut can shift the rather volatile urinary nitrogen excretion to a more stable form of fecal nitrogen, thus reducing the slurry pH and helping solve the issue. To better understand the whole process, read this.