Abstract Over the past 20 years, commercial swine operations have advanced in virtually every area, from genetic improvement, increased veterinary care and oversight, biosecurity understanding and improved hygiene, focused welfare and environmental practices, and specific pig nutrient specifications and ingredient utilization. Despite these advancements, feeding practices in commercial finishing barns have remained relatively unchanged. From a nutrition perspective, numerous research trials have shown that specific nutrient requirements of individual pigs can be precisely determined based on body weight, growth rate, and genetics. Despite this, standard industry practice still formulates diets based on the average pig weight within a barn or group rather than an individual pig requirement. Commercial swine facilities typically have only a handful of feed bins and a common feed line used to feed a single diet to all pigs within a facility. Meanwhile, the standard deviation in BW for late-finishing pigs is generally greater than 10 kg, meaning there is often greater than a 50 kg range in BW of pigs in that same facility. Feeding a common diet, often formulated to the average pig, inherently means that 50% of animals will be over-fed requirements while the remaining 50% will be under-fed. Opportunities exist, through technology or changes in general practices, to implement precision feeding concepts that strategically use ideal nutrient levels to maximize performance in the lightest pigs within the population. Over the past 2 years, United Animal Health has conducted a series of trials aimed at evaluating the effects of precision feeding pigs in commercial research facilities equipped with a computerized feed system capable of feeding specific diets to specific pens within the facility. Research personnel have sorted pigs by BW into Heavy, Medium and Light weight subgroups and then formulated research diets to more accurately meet the nutritional requirements of each BW subgroup. In one study, results demonstrated an 8.6 kg increase in BW in the lightest population, and in another, showed that precision feeding pigs throughout grow-finish improved BW by 0.91 kg in the lightest population and reduced coefficient of variation in BW by 3.0% units. Implementing precision feeding concepts could serve as a valuable nutritional tool to reduce population variation and improve the performance of light weight pigs in later marketing events, while also reducing overfeeding and nutrient waste in heavy weight pigs. Research continues to be conducted to show the economic value of precision feeding to offset the increased labor and/or capital expenditures necessary for implementation.
Goehring et al. (Wed,) studied this question.