Dr. Denise Beaulieu, a research scientist with the Prairie Swine Centre says the palatability of rations is a key factor in maximizing feed intake when transitioning young piglets from mother’s milk to solid feed.
Because the gastrointestinal tract of the piglet at weaning is so small, it is important to balance the rations carefully to ensure it gets the nutrients needed to maximize early growth.
The Prairie Swine Centre conducts research on behalf of western Canadian pork producers. Specializing in the areas of nutrition, swine behaviour, engineering, and environment.

The PSC on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc scientists are exploring feed processing techniques designed to improve the nutritional value of rations fed to newly weaned pigs.
Dr. Beaulieu says at weaning, feed intake is a limiting factor and weaning is a particularly stressful time for the pig.
“It’s being removed from the sow where all it’s had at that point in time is milk so it has to adapt to dry feed, it has to adapt to plant proteins, it has to adapt to a new environment without the sow so all of these can cause a lot of reactions in the young pig,” she says. “It’s a very, very stressful few days post weaning and we have to formulate diets that are very palatable so we have some animal products in there, for example some milk by-products.”
Dr. Beaulieu says the newly weaned pig has only seen proteins from milk. It’s important to make that transition a little bit slow to help the pig adapt to plant proteins over a period of a few days.
“Because new proteins, if the cells in the gut have not seen these before, they can cause an allergic reaction so we have to adapt it slowly,” she said. “The other issue, if the pig has not tasted these before, it may not want something that’s novel or new so we have to adapt the piglet to these slowly over time.”
Scientists are evaluating hundreds of different combinations of feed ingredients and treatments.  •
— By Harry Siemens
photos supplied by Prairie Swine Centre