Blend feeding or feeding a single diet reduces feed costs with no impact on growth performance or carcase value
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2009
Conference Title
Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Pig Science Association
Place of Publication
Cairns
ISBN
978-0-9806880-0-9
ISSN
1324 9177
Keywords
pigs, swine
Disciplines
Animal Sciences | Meat Science
Abstract
Conventional practice in the pig industry is for pigs to be fed three or four diets during the grower-finisher period. However, since the requirements of pigs are constantly changing the diet is frequently supplying excess nutrients. Blend feeding, in which two diets are mixed together in varying ratios, allows the diet to be changed at least weekly. This has the potential to reduce feed costs as the diet more accurately matches the requirements of the growing pig (Mullan et al., 1997). The opportunity to blend feed is now more commercially viable with the development of dry and liquid feeding systems, which have the ability to deliver any number of blends of feed in different pens. On the opposite spectrum is feeding the same diet through the grower-finisher period. The hypothesis for this experiment was that blend feeding or feeding a single diet would reduce the cost of production compared to the conventional system, by minimising the over-supply of nutrients without adversely affecting pig growth performance or carcase quality.
Recommended Citation
Moore, K L,
Nicholls, R R,
and
Mullan, B P.
(2009), Blend feeding or feeding a single diet reduces feed costs with no impact on growth performance or carcase value, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Pig Science Association, Cairns, pp.181-181.
https://library.dpird.wa.gov.au/conf_papers/137
