Sustainable swine nutrition
A traditional nutrition approach considers proteins as sources of essential and non-essential amino acids, energy, minerals, fibre and vitamins. Nowadays, our consideration of nutrition is more complex, including not only the effect of nutrition on performance, but also how nutrition impacts animal welfare, environmental pollution, manure management, health status, and product quality.
Sustainable nutrition has become a must for various phases of animal production. Increasing pressure concerning antibiotic usage, rising consumer awareness about the impact of our industry on environment and animal welfare; these are all clear signals regarding the need for sustainable nutrition. We have increasingly focused more attention on hind gut fermentation and the role of high digestible ingredients in post-weaning diets. We have also addressed the overall benefits of fibre in sow and piglet diets, while advancing our understanding of the role of functional ingredients in accelerating young gut development.
Modern genetics have brought huge competitiveness to our industry, while also imposing higher nutrition, health, and management challenges. Today’s top swine producing countries face increasing pre-weaning mortalities due to large litter sizes at farrowing and an increased percentage of small piglets.
Improving the resistance of piglets
Phileo by Lesaffre has investigated the effect of the yeast probiotic Actisaf® Sc 47 in helping to combat the increasing challenge of high pre-weaning mortalities. Several studies have demonstrated positive effects from supplementing gestating and lactating sows with Actisaf® Sc 47. Benefits include improvements in colostrum and milk quality, through the increased concentration of IgG and IgA in the sow’s plasma, and therefore in colostrum and milk. This improves the piglet’s immune response, gut health, and performance, along with an overall reduction in piglet diarrhoea and pre-weaning mortalities.
Improving animal growth with Prosaf®
Prosaf® is produced through a fully controlled food grade process, guaranteeing a consistent, safe and traceable product, free from contamination or sanitary risk. As a result of this manufacturing expertise, Prosaf®’s innovative characteristics include 63% protein content, high amino-acid digestibility, and high levels of total nucleic acids and glutamic acid – 7.7% and 10.9% respectively. Using Prosaf®, has shown promising increases in feed intake, while modulating the gut of post-weaning piglets and improving piglet performance.
A trial was carried out on 250 weaning pigs, which received different dosages of Prosaf® in the pre-starter feed I. After only 15 days of supplementation, the animals receiving 2% of Prosaf® show an improved growth with an average daily gain (ADG) of 52 g higher compared to the control group.
Better gut health, better nutrition
The effects of Prosaf® could be explained by the high digestibility of the amino acid profile, the high level of glutamate, and also the benefits of Prosaf® of the gut health. The Shannon index is a measure of microbial diversity. The animals were supplemented from weaning and during 28 days. The result shows that Prosaf® increases microbial diversity in the gut: a more diverse population is more stable and resilient to any kind of environmental or nutritional influences or changes.
A field trial was carried out in a farm under high gut health challenge. The animals were supplemented in Prosaf® (2% or 4%) from weaning and during 15 days. The supplementation in Prosaf® decreased by 63% the mortality rate. Furthermore, the number of culled pigs after weaning was also lower of 60% in the Prosaf® group.
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