Dietary ω-6 to ω-3 Fatty Acid Ratios Affect Protein Deposition in Nursery Pigs
An experiment was conducted to determine if decreasing the dietary omega-6 (ω-6) to omega-3 (ω-3) fatty acid (FA) ratio would affect protein deposition in nursery pigs during a prolonged E. coli lipopolysaccharide (LPS) inflammatory challenge. Following a one week long challenge, six week old piglets fed a lower ω-6:...
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Ken Engele
Dietary ω-6 to ω-3 Ratio Impacts Nursery Pigs
Results from these experiments indicate that altering the omega(ω)-6 to ω-3 fatty acid (FA) ratio can improve nursery pig performance, and protein deposition, potentially by diverting nutrients away from an unnecessary inflammatory response. Additionally, we found no effects on piglet performance or health by altering the amount without changing the...
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Ken Engele
Can Bovine Colostrum Mitigate the Post-Weaning Growth Lag?
Bovine colostrum is a good source of nutrients and growth factors, and is very palatable. It was added to the creep feed of piglets in the farrowing room and to the phase one diets immediately post-weaning to determine if it would increase feed intake, and help reduce the impacts...
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Ken Engele
Are My Pigs Eating?
Recent trials conducted at the Prairie Swine Centre, Inc. have confirmed the importance of feed intake by the piglet immediately post-weaning and/or consumption of creep feed in the farrowing room. We have also demonstrated that more than half of the piglets may not consume either creep feed, or the...
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Ken Engele
Will Hogs Provided with Whey Compensate in Feed and Water Intake?
Minimizing feed cost is always important for improving profits in swine production and can sometimes be accomplished by utilizing by-products from other agricultural industries. Whey, a product of the dairy processing industry, has well-known beneficial properties as a feed additive and is typically fed to newly weaned pigs in...
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Ken Engele
Assessing Whey to Reduce Feed Cost
Deproteinized whey permeate is a by-product of the cheese-making industry. Depending on the type of cheese being produced it can be categorized as “sweet whey” or “acid whey”, the latter contains about 4.7% organic acids. The objective of this experiment was to determine the response of weanling pigs to...
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Ken Engele
Effect of Dietary Calcium and Phosphorus in Sows
This study was designed to determine the influence of Ca and P intake by young, gestating sows on the growth and skeletal development of their developing piglets and if smaller birthweight piglets are at greater risk from mineral insufficiency during gestation. A total of 30 sows were randomly assigned...
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Ken Engele
Can Flaxseed Replace Antibiotics in Starter Diets?
We hypothesized that feeding n-3 FA’s to sows in the form of flaxseed would allow for the removal of Ab’s in starter feeds. Based on the findings from this trial, we can neither accept nor reject this hypothesis, as we found that in our high health herd, Ab’s...
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Ken Engele
Feeding Value of Cull Lentils
The current study was designed to characterize the nutritive composition, including digestibility and energy concentration, of feed-grade (cull) lentils for growing pigs. We conducted two studies. The first study determined the amount and digestibility of energy and amino acids in two samples of lentils. In the second study...
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Ken Engele
Stimulating Exploratory Behaviour – Effect on Creep Consumption
This study investigated whether feed consumption before and after weaning can be increased through stimulating exploratory behaviour in piglets, and whether this is best achieved through provision of enrichment (E), or through presentation of creep feed in a large tray feeder (TF) so as to facilitate synchronized feeding among littermates. Enrichment...
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Ken Engele