Canada - Prairie Swine Centre Research Shows Different Wheat Classes Perform Equally in Swine Rations

Research conducted at the Prairie Swine Centre has shown pigs fed different classes of wheat of equal quality will perform equally well. Often wheat grown to target a specific end use will fall short of the grade specifications for that market and end up as animal feed. However questions have been raised about the suitability of certain types of wheat for feed. In an effort to determine whether class will affect swine growth, scientists at the Prairie wine Centre compared the performance of weaner pigs fed rations containing six different classes of wheat, including prairie spring white, prairie spring red, western red spring, western amber durum, western red winter and western hard white, over a three week period. University of Alberta feed industry research chair Dr. Ruurd Zijlstra says two samples of each class, all of equal quality, where gathered and analyzed for the study. "Basically we ended up with 12 samples of wheat that were of excellent quality meaning that we could very specifically look at, might there be any difference among these wheat classes when it comes to animal performance. What we basically found in this study is that when you strictly use weaner pig performance over a three week period as an indicator of nutritional quality there was basically no difference among those six wheat classes. When we would go into a little bit more detail and look at energy digestibility we measured some minor differences but those minor differences in energy digestibility, they were not reflected at all in weaner pig performance." Dr. Zijlstra notes, regardless of class, the quality of a particular wheat sample can vary widely so he recommends having the quality of each batch analyzed based on fibre and protein content.