Feeding The Young Piglet

One of the readers asked how to feed a two month old piglet, and how many Kilograms per day do you feed it. Let me start off by saying that a piglet from the “Nursing” to the “Grower Stage” gains muscle mass very cheaply, and you want to feed it all the feed that it will eat at these stages. I decided to try and answer his first question, and more, by describing how to feed a young piglet.

When I was in the production field, back in the early 1990’s, I worked for a progressive owner, who used a simple form of “Phase Feeding”. “Phase Feeding For The Young Piglet” is a 3 to 4 stage program whereby you feed the nearly exact nutrients to a pig at each stage of its growth. It allows you to meet the piglet’s needs, without over feeding expensive ingredients when they are essentially no longer needed. (1) Complex nursery diets usually consist of 3 to 4 phases, depending on what age you wean at.

The first three diets of “Phase Feeding” are: “Early Wean Diet” which is feed to 8-12# piglets ( i.e. 3.6-5.5 Kgs. ) and is about 23% protein. (2) “Phase 1 Diets” are fed to 12-15# piglets ( i.e. 5.5-6.8 Kgs. ), and are about 21% protein.(1,2) “Phase 2 Diets” are fed to 15-25# piglets ( i.e. 6.8-11.4 Kgs. ), and are from about 20.5-21% protein.(1,2) You may feed up to 2.0#s ( i.e. 1 Kg. ) of the “Early Wean Diet”, and up to 5.0#s ( i.e. 2.3 Kgs. ) of the “Phase 1 Diet”. It is recommended that you let a feed manufacturer produce the first three phase diets, due to the difficulty in making them. “Early Wean” and “Phase 1 Diets” usually have spray-dried blood plasma, but can also have fish meal, dried whey, blood cells, poultry meal, whey, protein concentrate, spray-dried blood meal, soybean meal or soy products to meet the high amino acid needs of the Early Wean and Phase 1 piglet. (1) “Phase 2 Diets” are similar to “Phase 1 Diets”, but are not quite as nutrient dense, and thus are a bit cheaper to feed. (1) The next two phases in a “Phase Feeding Program” start to introduce the corn-soybean meal based diets, but still have whey or other sources of lactose. (1) The “Phase 3 Diet” is feed to 25-50# piglets ( i.e. 11.4-22.7 Kg ), and is about 20% protein. (2) Once a piglet reaches 45-50#s ( i.e. 20.5-23.0 Kgs. ) it is ready for the “Grower Diet”. The “Grower Diet” is typically about 18.5% protein, and the grower pig may eat up to about 380.0#s ( i.e. 173.0 Kgs. ) of this feed. (2)

References

DeRouchey, J.M., R.D. Goodband, M.D. Tokach, J.L. Nelssen and S.S. Dritz. "Nursery Swine Nutrient Recommendations and Feeding Management. National Swine Nutrition Guide. (Cited on Oct. 19, 2013). Brendemuhl, J. and Myer, B. "Types of Swine Diets". University of Florida IFAS Extension Publication #AS44 (Cited on Nov. 20, 2013). Scharlach, W. "Focus On Feed Conversion". (Cited no Oct. 19, 2013). Tokach, M. "Developing Diets for Grower Pigs". Nov. 15, 2006. National Hog Farmer. (Cited on Oct. 19, 2013).