Swine Nutrition

A balanced diet is most essential for swine or pigs as we call them. With the rising costs of feed, pork producers have had to make their swine diets unique, meeting the needs of the pigs efficiently.

Various terms and concepts of swine nutrition are important parts of the topic related to animal husbandry and veterinary sciences. It will help you understand what types of diet they should eat, how much they should eat, and a lot more.

What is Swine Nutrition?

Although you can easily arrange swine food, finding a healthy and nutritious meal is the challenging part. A good feeding strategy includes choosing the right ingredients for pigs so that they can get the nutrients they need every day. 

Swine nutrition isn’t necessarily about specific ingredients in the food. Pigs just need energy and nutrients like amino acids, minerals, and vitamins to stay healthy. To understand more about a healthy swine diet, follow the article further and learn about swine nutrition. 

Energy Needs

Just like humans, pigs also need energy to stay alive, grow, reproduce, and feed their piglets. A large part of their energy comes from carbohydrates and fats. Fats and oils carry about 2.25 times more calories than carbohydrates.

Energy requirements and the energy content of pigs in terms of their food are often expressed in Metabolizable Energy (ME), which can be used to make food. 

Taking away the energy lost in faeces, urine, and gases from the total amount in the provided foodstuff is how you figure out how much ME is in the feedstuff.

Protein Necessity 

The building blocks of protein are different amino acids, chained together to form the nutrient. Adequate protein intake allows pigs to grow muscle tissues that also help in overall development.

However, amino acids are different from other types of food because they have nitrogen in them, which makes them different from carbohydrates and fats.

In Swine nutrition, amino acids and their role in protein are much more important than the quantity of protein. It is more essential than its level.

Significance Of Amino Acids In Swine Nutrition

Amino acids can be classified into two groups: essential & non-essential. Talking about non-essential amino acids, pigs synthesise them on their own using nitrogen provided in their diet while essential amino acids are externally offered in their food and undergo synthesis under some conditions based on the growth phase, dietary composition, or productive functionality. 

Lysine, methionine, tryptophan, threonine, and isoleucine are the most significant amino acids of the pigs’. These amino acids are the least available in cereal-based diets, which are the most common for pigs. Protein supply in the diet must be enough to offer all the essential amino acids along with nitrogen needed to begin synthesis of non-essential amino acids.

10 amino acids that are essential for pigs;

• Arginine
• Isoleucine
• Histidine
• Leucine
• Lysine
• Methionine plus cystine
• Phenylalanine plus tyrosine
• Threonine
• Tryptophan
• Valine

Role Of Minerals

Pigs need some vital minerals for growth, development, immune function, reproductive success, etc. Therefore, pig food must contain the right amount of minerals to maintain its potential and strength. 

The animal needs the proper amount of bioavailable minerals to keep its hemostatic state strength at all times of life. Besides, pigs need at least 13 different minerals present in their nutrition. In addition to calcium and chloride, copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus & selenium also must be added to foods regularly. 

Apart, Zinc must also be a part of the diet. Corn or milo-soybean meal-based diets that are practical have enough magnesium, potassium, and sulphur.

Need Of Vitamins

Vitamins are required for maintaining metabolic function, growth, and maintenance of healthy tissues. Few of the vitamins are produced by the pig’s body in enough quantity to meet requirements.

Feed ingredients frequently used in swine diets contain enough of other things for them. However, multi-vitamins must be included in the swine dietary part for the best results. They can be categorised into 2 groups: fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins.

Vitamins that are added to swine diets should be broken down into these two groups. Usually, A, D, E, and K fat-soluble vitamins are added to food. 

Conclusion

Swine nutrition is the key aspect when it comes to taking proper care of pigs. Every pig requires a certain amount of nutrition just like humans to function, perform basic activities and live a healthy life. 

It is crucial to ascertain the nutritional requirements of pigs so that the person taking care of them can feed them with the right food having the right amount of nutrition. This leads to better health and reproduction. Also, it results in more piglets with time while boosting their immunity against any potential disease.