High Fiber Swine Diets
Including co-products in swine diets can often increase the fiber content above that of corn and soybean meal diets. The fermentability, viscosity, and gut passage rate can vary between sources of fiber, and can influence bacteria colonization and endocrine responses. Nursery pigs can possibly maintain performance on lower energy, higher fiber diets. A study testing the effects of replacing soybean meal with alternative ingredients found no clear pattern to the feed intake changes, even though digestibility decreased. When energy and amino acid content were kept constant, pigs maintained growth performance with the addition of certain alternative ingredients. Grow-finish pigs may also be able to maintain growth performance with alternative ingredients, but the higher fiber diets tend to increase gut volume and weight, so dressing percent decreases. Feeding co-products offers a the opportunity to reduce feed costs, but usually increase the dietary fiber of a diet.