Increasing Dietary Lysine Impacts Differently Growth Performance of Growing Pigs Sorted by Body Weight

Pau Aymerich; Carme Soldevila; Jordi Bonet; Josep Gasa; Jaume Coma; David Solà-Oriol

doi:10.3390/ani10061032

Increasing Dietary Lysine Impacts Differently Growth Performance of Growing Pigs Sorted by Body Weight

Animals (Basel). 2020 Jun 13;10(6):1032. doi: 10.3390/ani10061032.

Authors

Pau Aymerich^{1

2}, Carme Soldevila¹, Jordi Bonet¹, Josep Gasa², Jaume Coma¹, David Solà-Oriol²

Affiliations

¹ Vall Companys Group, 25191 Lleida, Spain.
² Animal Nutrition and Welfare Service, Department of Animal and Food Sciences, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain.

Abstract

An experiment was conducted analyzing whether growing pigs classified in different initial body weight categories (BWCAT) have a different response to increasing standardized ileal digestible lysine to net energy ratio (SID Lys:NE), to assess whether light pigs might benefit from being differentially fed. A total of 1170 pigs in pens of 13 were individually weighed, classified in 3 BWCAT (Lp: 32.1 ± 2.8 kg, Mp: 27.5 ± 2.3 kg, and Sp: 23.4 ± 2.9 kg), and afterwards pens were randomly allocated to 5 dietary SID Lys:NE treatments (3.25 to 4.88 g/Mcal) fed over 47 days. Results reported a greater linear improvement of growth and feed efficiency of Sp compared to Lp when increasing SID Lys:NE. Modelling the response to SID Lys:NE using quadratic polynomial models showed that the levels to reach 98% of maximum growth from day 0-47 were 3.67, 3.88, 4.06 g SID Lys/Mcal NE for Lp, Mp, and Sp, respectively. However, due to the overlapping SID Lys:NE confidence intervals at maximum performance, it was not possible to determine if requirements were different between BWCAT. Summarizing, the results suggested that feeding small pigs greater SID Lys:NE than large pigs can improve their performance and increase the efficiency of the overall production system.

Keywords: body weight; growing pig; lysine; requirements.