Pig farmers assured of semen supply amid ministry shortage

he Ministry of Agriculture’s inability to source pig semen to help farmers improve their animals’ genetics is not adversely affecting pig rearing in the country, Barbados TODAY can reveal.

While there may appear to be a shortage of the fluid, which is stored at the ministry’s Animal Nutrition Unit on Pine East-West Boulevard, an investigation has revealed that hundreds of farmers still have access to semen through the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS).

On Monday, during the Down to Brass Tacks call-in programme, Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir revealed that farmers have been experiencing challenges obtaining semen from the unit because the ministry was unable to source the product. But on Tuesday, President of the Barbados Pig Farmers Association, Henderson Williams, explained that a special arrangement had been made for BAS farmers.

“I cannot speak to the issues [the Ministry of Agriculture] are having with their semen programme, but the BAS brought in semen this year, and the Animal Nutrition Unit stores it for us. If the ministry is short, we have semen for our members, so we would not be impacted by what is going on as we have supply for our members,” he said, adding that there were well over 200 BAS pig farmers and the semen was readily available to them.

This programme, he said, would “augment what is happening in terms of the ministry’s general semen programme”.

Williams said the BAS implemented the pig semen programme to help its members improve genetics on their farms and boost production. He said that over the years, the organisation noticed issues with semen supply directly from the ministry, causing setbacks in the industry. A decision was therefore taken for the BAS to establish its own programme, exclusively for its members.

“We found sometimes that the government is out of stock or out of semen from a particular breed that the farmers want,” he said.

Williams could not immediately provide figures on the availability of straws, the clear, flexible tubes used to store and transport frozen livestock semen.

Artificial insemination is a widespread technique in the livestock industry. It offers a number of benefits over natural breeding, including increased production efficiency and better genetics.

When questioned during the radio programme, the minister could not shed any light on how long the shortage of semen had been going on or how many farmers were being affected.

An expert pig inseminator, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that farmers have reported difficulties sourcing semen through the ministry for several weeks. The situation has been complicated by problems obtaining liquid nitrogen, crucial for semen storage.

He told Barbados TODAY: “We get our semen from Swine Genetics in Iowa (United States). We used to get the liquid nitrogen from Trinidad, but we set up a place here. But the place in Wildey is down, so they have to go back to Trinidad to get it. So there was a shortage of both—the liquid nitrogen and the semen,” he said, stressing how carefully one must store pig semen compared to other animal semen.

“Sometimes we bring in over 250 or 300 straws, anything around there. Boar semen is 11 inches because it doesn’t freeze well; you lose a lot of the sperm when you freeze it. So it is a lot more difficult to manage canisters with boar semen than canisters with bull semen. So liquid nitrogen is a critical thing.”

sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb