Sciencing The Art Of Feed Formulation

What's Missing From A Weaned Pig's Diet

“The answer is the subject of today - nutrient digestion kinetics or the rate of nutrient digestion,” he said. “Currently piglet feed formulation, piglet diets, and all pig diets are formulated on the extent of digestion, and that's based on two different boxes - the stomach and small intestine is one box, and the whole pig is another box. What’s missing is the rate (how fast or how slow) of digestion.”

Trouw Nutrition’s lab research shows that the nursery pig is about to become a stressed post-weaned piglet that’s experiencing many challenges. Switching from sow’s milk to solid feed really changes the rate of digestion of feed ingredients compared to a growing pig. Research indicates that some of these stressful conditions, which can be simulated in lab tests, cause some traditional pig feed ingredients, like fish meal and corn, to be more slowly digested compared to other ingredients that would never be fed to a piglet.

Role stress plays in digestion

One eye-opening moment related to stress came during an in vitro system that was set up for the stressed pig and a normal growing pig. A soy protein concentrate was added into those two systems, and the difference in digestion rate or the kinetics of that protein digestion was startling. One system basically produced tofu that was slowly utilized because the conditions were so stressful and so different that it didn’t behave as expected. Thus, it was eye-opening and helped to explain that the feed ingredient contained specific kinetics in a stressful situation.