The recent Teagasc annual pig conference provided an opportunity to highlight those nutritional factors that impact on piglet performance, directly post-weaning.
It is vitally important to encourage piglets to maintain fluid intake post-weaning. It can take more than a week after weaning for the pig to restore its daily fluid intake to the equivalent of that on the day prior to weaning.
Access to water
A suckling pig has equivalent water consumption prior to weaning of approximately 680ml. However, water intake is only in the region of 290ml in the first day post-weaning and averages around 442ml in the first week after weaning.
It is only in the second week post-weaning that water intake averages 770ml/pig.
So, encouraging water intake will promote feed intake.
Appropriate sizing, number, positioning and hygiene of water drinkers is essential to ensure adequate hydration and feed intake.
Equally important is ensuring the chemical and microbiological quality of the water supply used.
Piglet diet acidification
Early weaned piglets produce insufficient levels of gastric acid which can result in a high stomach pH values.
As a result, the digestion of nutrients, especially protein is reduced. Moreover, high pH is favourable for the proliferation of diarrhoea-causing micro-organisms in the weaned pig.
The use of organic acids has been suggested as a means of lowering gastric pH in a weaned piglet and has been reported to improve growth performance.
Feed intake in one experiment was increased by approximately 32% in ‘week 1’ and by 11% over the first three weeks after weaning due to the dietary addition of fumaric acid.
However, the response to diet acidification is not always consistent in a piglet and is likely to be higher at times of greater microbial challenge.
An alternative strategy to diet acidification, to achieve similar results, is to feed a diet with a low acid binding capacity.
Reduced crude protein diets
Reducing crude protein (CP) in the diet prevents an excess of undigested protein reaching the large intestine, where it contributes to the growth of pathogenic bacteria, such as E. coli and the production of harmful compounds.
The practice can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea in pigs.
The requirements of weaned pigs for amino acids are high for growth but also to counteract health challenges, and therefore low CP diets must be supplemented with synthetic amino acids.
It has been shown that adequate synthetic amino acid supplementation is an effective approach to limit diarrhoea in pigs weaned at 28 days, without affecting weight gain and protein deposition.
Feeding liquid milk replacer post-weaning
Recent research at Moorepark, Co. Cork has shown that post-weaning liquid milk supplementation increased feed intake and growth in the immediate post-weaning period.
This approach will likely benefit light and vulnerable pigs at weaning.
Since milk supplementation greatly increased early post-weaning feed intake, the practice could be particularly useful for delivering bioactive compounds to the pig gut during the critical post-weaning window.
Providing liquid milk replacer in addition to dry pelleted starter diet, improved the intestinal structure of newly weaned piglets.
The results suggest that the period of liquid milk supplementation should be for between four and 10 days post-weaning.
However, on a dry matter basis, milk replacer is almost three times the price of a starter diet and for this reason should be used sparingly.