Wijesiriwardana, UA, Plush, KJ, Tritton, S et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Feeding Sows Lucerne, or Diets with Similar Energy and Nutritional Profiles to Lucerne, Improves the Pre-Weaning Performance of Piglets. Agriculture, 11 (11). 1146. ISSN 2077-0472
Abstract
Feeding fibre and branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) to sows during late gestation and lactation, respectively, have been shown to improve litter weights at weaning. Therefore, supplementing primiparous sow diets with lucerne chaff, a feedstuff high in fibre, BCAA and tryptophan, may improve the performance of their progeny. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of feeding primiparous sows (n = 118) either (i) a control diet (CON); (ii) CON with 1 kg of lucerne chaff (LUC); or (iii) a diet formulated to have a similar digestible energy and BCAA content as CON + LUC (SIMLUC 1) until farrowing. The LUC and SIMLUC 1 diets improved day 21 litter weight (p = 0.055). In Experiment 2 primiparous (n = 111) and multiparous sows (parities 2–5, n = 112) were fed either the CON or SIMLUC diet (SIMLUC 2) from day 110 of gestation to farrowing (PreF), or to day 10 post-farrowing (PreF + PostF). The SIMLUC 2 diet tended to be more beneficial to primiparous compared to multiparous sows when fed PreF, as indicated by an interaction between diet and parity on day 21 average piglet weights (p = 0.078). Overall, SIMLUC is most effective in improving primiparous progeny performance as evidenced by their D21 weights.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | gilt progeny; lucerne; primiparous sow; weaning weights |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 15 Dec 2021 14:23 |
Last Modified: | 15 Dec 2021 14:23 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/agriculture11111146 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:181393 |