Pretreatment of Feed Ingredients to Enhance Value
Grains are typically harvested at <15% moisture to maintain quality during storage. When harvested at >15%, artificial drying may be employed but this increases cost. Low-quality high-moisture grains may also be preserved by acidification. These experiments were conducted with the overall objective of determining whether the...
Evaluating New Crop Grain
Density or bushel weight is commonly used to estimate grain quality. Bushel weight is easy, low-cost and fast, ADF and NDF are none of these. Research over the past 20 years, however, has been unable to demonstrate a good relationship between bushel weight and feeding quality of grains for...
Feeding Green to Save Green
Pork producers are always looking for new ways in which they can increase their efficiencies through reducing feed costs. Feeding coproducts from the fuel ethanol industry like distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) or from the wheat flour industry like millrun can...
Interaction of Dietary Fibre and Immune Challenge on Threonine Requirements and Pig Robustness
Sub-clinical disease results in reduced growth and less efficient use of nutrients. With the elimination of in-feed antibiotics for growth promotion it is increasingly important to understand the interaction between nutrition and health and nutrient requirements during disease challenge events. This project set out to more...
Creep Feeding in the Farrowing Room: Do the Outcomes Depend on Weaning Age?
Creep feed could benefit older weaned piglets by supplementing nutrients in sows’ milk. Additionally, it could aid the transition to solid feed at weaning, perhaps more of a benefit to the younger weaned piglet. In our experiment, body weight at nursery exit was greater...
Dr. Dan Columbus – 2019 CSAS Young Scientist Award
Dr. Dan Columbus Canadian Society of Animal Science, 2019 Young Scientist Award Dr. Daniel Columbus is a Research Scientist in Nutrition at Prairie Swine Centre and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science at the University of Saskatchewan. ...
Assessing Particle Size and the Cost of Grinding
Particle size reduction improves feed efficiency in all stages of the production cycle in pigs. Based on studies by researchers at Kansas State University (KSU), an average particle size of 700 to 800 microns (um) is recommended. However, this recommendation is based on studies conducted using...
Interaction of Dietary Energy and Phytase on Performance of Weanling Pigs
Approximately 60 to 80% of the phosphorus (P) in cereal grains and oil seeds is bound to phytate and unavailable to monograstics, including swine. Supplementing swine diets with the phytase enzyme improves P availability and retention. The phytate molecule complexes other minerals, proteins, and...
Response of Growing-Finishing Pigs to Dietary Energy Concentration
In this trial, feeding lower energy, lower cost diets had no effect on ADG or on loin thickness, but did improve feed efficiency, and reduced backfat thickness. This indicates that lower energy diets may be used to increase net income. This experiment was...
Precision Feeding for Gestating Sows
The objective of this project was to assess the impact of an individualized feeding strategy for pregnant sows whose dietary intakes vary depending on stage of gestation and the individual characteristics of the sow, on growth performances, productivity and feed...
The Effects of Water Availability and Space Allowance on Productivity and Profitability
Reduced floor space allowance for pigs may negatively affect growth performance as a result of competition for feed and water access, especially at later stages of the grower-finisher period. However, kilograms of pork produced per unit of floor space may increase with more pigs...
The Interaction Between Pig Density and Dietary Energy on Performance
Dietary net energy and stocking density independently affect performance, feed utilization and profits in the finisher barn. The objective of this experiment was to assess the interactions of stocking density and dietary energy, and determine how these interactions affect net income. When stocking density...