Jon De Jong

IntroductionHistorically, the impact of foreign animal diseases (FADs) on global livestock production and economics has been devastating [1]. In 1997, Taiwan and the Netherlands experienced outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and Classical Swine Fever (CSF), respectively [2, 3]. In Taiwan, the estimated cost of the FMD outbreak was $379 million, due to the slaughter of over 4 million pigs, a ...

IntroductionResearch has shown that adding high levels of copper (primarily from CuSO4 ) to diets fed to nursery pigs will result in improved growth performance. It is thought that copper acts as an antimicrobial-like feed additive in the gut of the young pig, which influences the microflora in the intestine and leads to improvements in growth performance. Copper also has been shown to improve ADG ...

IntroductionNursery pigs often experience a lag in growth performance when transitioning from sows’ milk to dry feed during weaning. The lag is caused by several factors, including the dietary and environmental stresses associated with weaning. This post-weaning challenge can be associated with suppressed performance, diarrhea, and other intestinal health problems. While compensatory gain ma ...

IntroductionThe use of standardized ileal digestible (SID) AA has become a standard approach in diet formulation as it helps to accurately meet a pig’s requirement, and enhance the ingredient utilization. Lysine is the first limiting AA in corn and soybean meal diets for swine. In addition, Lys is used to estimate the requirement of other essential AA; which are expressed as a ratio relative ...

IntroductionIt is generally thought that as diets are ground to a smaller mean particle size, a linear improvement in nutrient utilization and pig performance will be observed. Research has demonstrated this benefit when particle size is reduced from 1,000 microns to approximately 600 microns. However, further reduction of particle size below 600 microns has not shown consistent benefits when fed ...

IntroductionEscalating costs of typical swine feed ingredients such as corn and soybean meal has created a demand for producers to consider feeding diets containing higher levels of byproducts to nursery and finishing pigs to reduce feed cost. However, these alternative feed ingredients are generally higher in fiber and lower in dietary energy compared to the cereal g ...