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Prairie Swine Centre is an affiliate of the University of Saskatchewan
Prairie Swine Centre is grateful for the assistance of the George Morris Centre in developing the economics portion of Pork Insight.
Financial support for the Enterprise Model Project and Pork Insight has been provided by:
Sow Nutrition in Group Housing Systems
Posted in: Pork Insight Articles, Prairie Swine Centre, Production, Swine Innovation by student on July 25, 2018
Speaker: Dr. Hyatt Frobose
Summary:
Increase in protein deposition over the course of gestation, later in gestation have an increased protein due to increase in mammary development. Three main components to energy are: maintenance, target maternal BW gain, and fetal development. Have to adjust basal requirement due to a variety of factors including: environmental temperature, housing system, health status and sow size (different parities).
There are broad categories of feeding systems, competitive and non competitive feeding systems. Aggression can have consequences such as an increased mortality rate, removals (due to lame or aborts), have to assume that all the sows are eating, and due to variation in body condition score potentially need to overfeed the group.
Over conditioned sows are costly because they are wasting feed and they have decreased productivity in the subsequent lactation. Common causes of over conditioned sows are overfeeding an entire pen to improve BCS of thin sows, not calibrating ESF, and improper staff training with regards to BCS.
Try to identify “non-eaters” quickly and move them to a relief pen.
Increasing inclusion of fibre helps to increase satiety and decrease aggression. However, variability in nutrients is significant in high fibre diets. There is also a greater risk of mycotoxin contamination in feeding high fibre diets.
Bump Feeding: traditionally, showed that sows had higher birth weights. However, most of the recent data shows that there is a limited to no benefit from pump feeding.
Parity Specific Diets – most diets are formulated to meet the requirements of gilts as they have higher amino acid and calcium requirements than older sows. Opportunity exists to save on the older sows as we can feed a diet that is more sync with their requirements, rather than overfeeding amino acids.