Feeding the modern sow:Why is the average sow fed justOne diet

摘要

IT USED TO BE that pigs were fed a choice of two diets: an 18% starter and a 16% grower. Over time that has become more specialized, allowing for nutritional requirements through four to six phases of their life cycles.So why do we still feed one diet to sows? It doesn't make sense. They're not the same sowswe had forty years ago, so why do we feed them like we did forty years ago?These were questions posed by Ron Ball, Professor Emeritus of Swine Nutrition and the Alberta Pork Producers' Research Chair at the University of Alberta. He was in Toronto recently at the Novartis Animal Health launch of their new product Denagard 10, defining the need to re-evaluate sow diets based on his conclusions to date from his lifetime of contributions to the study of amino acid nutrition in pigs.