[SOUND] [MUSIC] So thank you for participating in this course. Six weeks. Good course? >> Very good course. Very good course, Dr. Hovish, yes. >> I wonder, is this the first time that we've had a whole community, international community, different countries talking about livestock-based food production? So it's sort of a community learning from each other, which is what that course has been in some way, isn't? >> Yeah, I don't know if it's the first, but certainly in my travels around the world, right, we've both been really fortunate in being able to see a lot of world food production. This has been a really unique opportunity for me to get a completely different perspective on a lot of people's methods and views and constraints, really, to them achieving success in feeding themselves. >> because, every country needs food, and every country uses animals to a greater or lesser degree. And we looked over time, the commonalities even over time have been a necessity for efficiency, and still got to be profitable, right, because it's a business. So what word though, Jim, I mean, we covered so many topics. What one word would sum up the whole six weeks for you? because we talked about nutrition, we talked about growth, we've talked about bug pathogens. We've talked about disease, immunity. >> We talked about herds >> Herds, yeah, populations, yeah, yeah. One word? >> Probably doesn't come first to mind to a lot of people, but then maybe it's my bias and my fallback, but the word people comes to mind. Because if I think about, really, over time and across all over the whole world, the constraints that happen. Technology changes, our animals change, what resources we have to use change. The diseases change, right? We eradicate disease, new diseases emerge. But if I think about that, the one constant we always have is people. And how they interact and the decisions they really make for their animals and their systems of raising food. >> I think that's right, isn't it, because every age has had people, and they've been learning this idea of animal stewardship, of animal husbandry, and management depends completely on them. The animals, because of domestication, are completely dependent on their carers. And so what they feed, what they eat, which we covered in one week. Their nutrition, they can't go and get their own food can they? >> Yeah, right, that's the definition between farming really, right, farmed animals and domestication and hunter-gatherer's, right? We don't allow the animals to choose anymore, we confine them even if that confinement is over hundreds of hectares. But we limit the resources they've got access to. And so, yeah, their food is 100% dependent upon what we provide to them or give them access to. >> So knowing what they need at different stages of production, that's been part of the advances isn't it? Understanding nutrition, understanding how the intestine works and how it manages different diets at different stages of production too. So those efficiencies come with that. >> Really, if you look at some huge gains made here at the University of Illinois, the ability to include new ingredients really. The revolution in including soya in monagastric diets was revolutionized here, and that's completely changed how we think about c onfined monogastric feeding. And our ability to have really have high-output production systems. So, advances happen, but that understanding is really critical. >> And they interact, right, so how we crop. I know it's a good example in the Midwest. So as you change how you raise crops, that's actually changed our livestock systems as well hasn't it? >> Exactly. >> But we don't- >> And our livestock system's changing, changed our crops. The ability to use soya in pig diets really allowed us to go to a very different cropping rotation. It allowed us to explode here in the Midwest. >> Our ability to have really high-output agriculture, because we didn't have to raise alfalfa, or we didn't have to raise other things to control disease in corn. And so, instead of historically having a three-crop rotation of wheat, or oats, and alfalfa and corn, we now had these soya beans that we could actually use, and use on a mass scale. To not only feed people, but feed pigs, and chickens. So our ability to change livestock farming changed our crop farming and vice versa. So that's been an interesting, but again, it's all people, how do we advance and manage to move the ball forward. >> Yeah, it was great for me to see people like Dr. Nofsinger and his group thinking about how we stress animals as well. So the immunity of animals and how we care for them, so we manage their immune system in some way. Our management systems interact with their ability to respond to disease as well. So that animal confidence, that air of animal confidence and moving them around in a way that's not stressful to them. >> I've really been blessed to get to work with Dr. Tom personally over the years here, and I think that one thing that maybe good animal caregivers know intuitively. But really Bud Williams who taught Tom, and now Dr. Tom have really taken that step, the next forward, to say, how do we as caregivers influence the well-being of our animals. And I think that that's going to be the next discussion, right? We talk about disease, and we talk about the impact of disease on welfare. But, really, how we as caregivers impact the attitude, the confidence, and subsequently, the immune system, right? That's the impressive thing to me is we look at that. If we handle those animals improperly, we make them scared, really the short term reductions in their immune system and their propensity for them to get sick. So that's an untapped field that we don't understand, but certainly one that over time we have to get better at. And again, it gets back to people. Getting our caregivers to really help us. So it's not always the technology, but the technology coupled with the people to make that technology successful. >> I love that he talked about, unless you have their confidence, you can't detect a disease very well. So that people-animal interaction and it being a good interaction also helps us detect disease earlier and so therefore prevent disease or treat it early and the system becoming more efficient in that way as well, which I thought was- >> I know the first time Dr. Tom took me in a feedlot pen, and said no, no, no do this, and you will see disease better. It was one of those, a, epiphany and b, really frustrating moments. I thought, you know, jiminy Jim, you've been screwing around for years, and you've never figured this out, right? But I think the ability to detect disease is really the first step on us controlling disease. So we can talk about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance and which antibiotic do we use? But if we don't know they're sick, and we talked about acute versus chronic disease. And we certainly know our ability to find animals when they're acute, radically improves the chance that they're going to survive. Maybe the difference of a 2% or 3% mortality rate in those animals that are detected sick acutely, versus chronic, where there may be 50% of them die. And so it's a huge impact on the sustainability of our systems, just our ability to identify those animals early. And again, it gets back to people skills being able to do that. >> It also puts us in the ecosystem. So to think of the farms in the ecosystems. We've talked about the animals are part of it, which we know. The bugs are part of it, so the whole microbiome, that it's not just eradicating nasty pathogens. It's making sure that the animals can live, without sounding fruity, in harmony with the bugs on their skin, and in their respiratory tract, and their intestinal tract. But the humans are the other part of that. The people, the other part of that ecosystem, isn't it? The farmers- >> They're kind of the big hand over the top of all of it, right? Because they manipulate where we keep them, and what the environment is, and what do we mix, and so hence, what bugs do we have, and which genotypes of animals do we select. It's that complex ecosystem interaction that, to me, we don't understand very well. And certainly I spent a lot of time over the years talking about that, but that's, that's the opportunity for us to understand better. And certainly, around the world that will always be different. And really, for everyone to help us contribute as a global community, of how do we improve the disease ecosystem that these critters have to live in to optimize productivity. >> That's a great point, Jimmy. So you think of this global ecosystem that we're all part of livestock food production because food moves around between different countries. And the, feeding the 9 billion by 2050 that you talked about, it's not going to be one country that's going to be able to do that. So we have this ecosystem, the global ecosystem, but it only works if the local ecosystem. It's think globally at locally, it's that we have to fix our local ecosystems before we can- >> But because of the interconnections today. >> Yeah, animal movement, food movement. >> Animal movement, food movement, people movement, right, we can just look at the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus outbreak in the United States in 2013. Right? It was a disease around the rest of the world that finally entered the U.S. in pigs. And so that transition in disease and understanding globally what's going on, and how those ecosystems function, will be important for other regions in the globe to be successful. We need to learn from each other and not view that what goes on in Europe, or the US, or China is particularly different. Those things are probably very similar, there's minor differences. But understanding how each others' ecosystems functions, because it's likely that those ecosystems are going to be closer together not farther apart as time goes on. >> So that's the course really. So, we've been part of this global ecosystem and hopefully helped livestock-based food production systems around the world. The principles are the same wherever you are in whatever country, and we've tried to emphasize that during the course. We've enjoyed it, it's been great working with you Jim, and it's been great working with all of you as well. And thank you for your input, and for taking care of all those tests and the discussion boards. So there's always lots to learn. We hope that this is the beginning of a learning community and not the end of one, just at the end of these six weeks. >> It's been fantastic working with you Dr. Aldridge, and we hope all of you've enjoyed it, as much as we've enjoyed putting this together, and getting to interact with you. Thank you. >> Thanks. 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