Lee J. Johnston

INTRODUCTIONOne of the greatest challenges in optimizing growth performance and health of newly weaned pigs is to overcome low and variable feed consumption which adversely affects gastrointestinal health during this critical transition period on commercial swine farms (Pluske et al., 1997; Langendijk et al. 2007; Dong and Pluske, 2007). Therefore, dietary interventions that encourage fa ...

1. IntroductionFor newborn piglets, the thermoneutral zone is about 34 °C [1]. However, to ensure thermal comfort of sows [2], the temperature in farrowing rooms is controlled to about 20 °C, which is markedly below the thermoneutral zone for newborn piglets [3]. The immature thermoregulatory ability of piglets makes maintenance of body temperature difficult for piglets and makes them pron ...

INTRODUCTIONSows in transition from gestation to lactation are in a period of dramatic physiological change due to high nutrient demands of rapidly growing fetuses in utero, parturition, and lactation. These physiological changes require coordinated hormonal, nutritional, and management transitions to optimize piglet viability and postnatal growth (Theil, 2015). Inadequate preparation for the ...

INTRODUCTIONPrevious studies (Widmer e al., 2008; Kim et al., 2009; Jacela et al., 2010) have measured metabolizable energy (ME) and standardized ileal digestible (SID) amino acid (AA) content in high-protein distillers dried grains (HP-DDG) produced using the old front-end fractionation processes, and these data were used in developing nutrient composition tables in NRC (2012). These nutritional ...

BackgroundMaize oil is an abundant source of vegetable oil used in human foods and animal feeds. Maize oil provides 8579 kcal/ kg of ME [1], which is comparable to soybean oil (8574 kcal/kg), and greater than canola oil (8384 kcal/kg) and palm kernel oil (7119 kcal/kg) when added to swine diets. The addition of lipids to animal feeds not only increases energy density, but also enhances the absorpt ...