Previous research trials that we’ve conducted showed that we can feed reduced net energy (NE) diets (≤2.3 Mcal/kg) to growout hogs instead of traditional energy levels (≥2.4 Mcal/kg) as long as hogs can increase feed intake to compensate for reduced dietary energy level. Conventional (solvent-extracted) canola meal and soy expeller offer opportunities to reduce or increase dietary net energy level at low cost. The objective of our trial was to compare the growth performance, carcass characteristics, and economics of barrows and gilts fed low or conventional NE diets including either canola meal or soy expeller to market weight.
From our results we concluded again that hogs can be fed diets with reduced feed energy (≤2.20 Mcal/kg) instead of traditionally fed energy levels (≥2.32 Mcal/kg) as long as pigs can sustain feed intake. Once again, our research showed that feeding lower NE diets resulted in greater profit margin after subtracting feed cost than feeding conventional energy levels. Abruptly introducing 25% canola meal in the grower phase diets was a challenge to hogs, either due to the fibre content and/or the taste. If hogs had been progressively introduced to canola meal, a drop in feed intake in the first 12 days would likely have been avoided. This experiment proved that both soy expeller and canola meal are good supplemental protein sources and can be fed to growout hogs without much problems.
Feeding canola meal or soy expeller at two feed energy levels to growout hogs (full article)
