The primary objective of pork production is to produce lean meat in a cost effective and sustainable manner. From a nutritional perspective, energy is perhaps the most critical nutrient, because it is the most expensive to provide in the diet and because gut capacity may limit the ability of the pig to consume sufficient quantities to achieve their full genetic potential for growth. It is generally assumed that feeding a higher nutrient density diet will enhance pig performance. The only outstanding question in most people’s minds is at what point does the higher cost of the high energy diet exceed the value of improved animal performance.

Confounding this logic is recent research at the Prairie Swine Centre showing that pigs do not always respond to higher energy diets with improved performance. Indeed, we have completed no less than 4 studies with nursery pigs showing no increase in growth rate when dietary energy was increased. Have we been wrong all these years in feeding high energy diets in order to achieve improved performance?

There are other reasons for wanting a better understanding of how the pig uses energy. For example, our knowledge of amino acid metabolism is rapidly increasing, with literally dozens of experiments on this subject completed each year. We are rapidly getting to the point where a nutritionist can estimate with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the optimum level of lysine and other amino acids required for a given farm operating under a given financial environment. However, before we can take full advantage of our knowledge on amino acids, we must have an equivalent understanding of energy – and that is certainly not the case at the present time.