The nutrient requirements of modern sows, and the availability of dietary nutrients for sows, are very poorly known in comparison to our knowledge of growing pigs. The number of published research papers in the last 40 years on growing pig nutrition is in the tens of thousands, however, there are only about 800 publications on sow nutrition listed in the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau database –less than 1% of all publications concerning pigs. If we still don’t know everything we need to about how to feed growing pigs – imagine what we don’t know about sows! The productivity of sows has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, however, the research, upon which current dietary recommendations are based, dates from the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s (ARC 1981, NRC 1998).
In addition, many of the nutrient recommendations for sows are unverified extrapolations from research in growing pigs. Our recent research shows that the current recommendations for both energy and amino acid intake in sows (NRC 1998) are incorrect by a significant margin. The economic benefit to producers of research to revise and update the energy and amino acid requirements of sows is estimated to be worth in excess of $4.50 per pig marketed (Grier et al 2006).