Getting the most out of your creep feeding for optimal piglet growth and sow performance does not necessarily require a fancy feast, new studies suggest.
Modern genetics have sows producing more piglets, which in turn requires a greater demand for milk for the sow and competition for the piglets. That can lead to its own problems.
Why It Matters
With input costs increasing in pork production operations, finding efficiencies in creep feeding rations can help producers save money.
“This tends to cause issues with piglets getting milk, and this can cause some concern in some variations in the body weight in the uniformity issues that we currently have,” says Atta Agyekum, a nutrition research scientist at the Prairie Swine Centre, when introducing his Creep Feeding Strategies and Piglet Performance: Lessons Learned From Recent Research, in Lethbridge, Alta.
“Some of them are not getting milk, they are hungry and die, increasing piglet mortality before weaning.”
Creep feeding in the farrowing rooms has the potential to offset these concerns and introduce piglets to solid food earlier. Agyekum showcases North American and European literature with varying results, where 65 per cent of the variation could be explained (Muro et al. 2024), with the highest contributors being piglet and litter performance, creep feeding duration and time of onset and overall creep intake.
Fresh feed, small amounts
The nutrition scientist suggest offering creep feed to piglets a minimum 14 days post-farrow to weaning, with the fresher the creep, the better for farrowing rooms. That presents labour challenges, which can be worked around.
“You want to do it as frequently as possible to give it fresh feed or else it won’t eat. One of the easiest ways to do is introduce creep feed in very small amounts. The first day, you can give around like 100 grams (per litter) to see how they will interact with the creep feed and consume it. That enables an increase over the days, instead of trying to give them everything at the same time,” says Agyekum, adding studies had feedings at early morning, adjusting as needed so there is no long empty period with little sitting stale.
“If it’s not fresh, it’s not going to encourage them to interact with or eat the creep feed.”
Simple beats complex
Four treatments were tested in control groups of no creep, simple and complex creep and both simple and complex creep in different feeders (14 days until weaning). Results show no real difference between simple and complex creep, with the group with access to both had slightly more intake, but was not statistically significant, with no clear preference between the two.
Pigs with lactation feed as creep have slightly better growth in the last week before weaning. Post-weaning performance, pigs that have no creep are slightly slower than creep-fed groups in the first week after weaning.
Add it all up, and there is cost savings to be had in input costs for creep feed to reduce weaning stress, higher weaning weights, gut development and supplementary nutrition in transition to solid food.
“We did not see any advantage of using a very expensive, complex creep feed in this setting. The take-home message is a simple creep is enough,” says Agyekum.
Sows hold their weight
Further research dips into creep strategies targeting lower birth-weight piglets, using different additives. The three treatments groups included the control group of nursery starter (no additives), a nursery starter with a canola prebiotic, and finally, the starter/prebiotic/oregano additive with Day 14 up until weaning. Sow monitoring was also made which saw weight benefits.
“We looked at the sow performance during the lactation period, there was no differences across the treatment groups. But, one of the things we saw was the weight of the sow while they were moving to the farrowing rooms,” says Agyekum.
“Although there were no differences across the treatment, we did see that all the sows gain around eight per cent body weight. So this translated into around 19 kilograms of body weight gain in the farrowing rooms. So I guess a simple explanation will be that perhaps the creep feed in this case, really ease the lactation stress on the sow. That’s why maybe they were able to preserve some of the body weight losses.”
Target smaller piglets
Birth weight is the main driver of performance to the end of nursery period. Normal birth‑weight piglets performed better overall than low birth‑weight piglets, no matter which creep they got. But, when they look specifically at interactions between body weight class and treatment, the control/prebiotic group for low birth-weight piglets show performance closer to the normal birth-weight group in the same treatment, especially in the first one to two week period before weaning.
“One of the things we learned from this is some of the strategies, they need to be more targeted is one of the approaches that we should be thinking going forward,” says Agyekum, focusing on using basic, moderate-sized pellet prebiotic creep on larger litters on the lower birth-weight piglets, at 10-14 days-of-age, with 14 days of access before weaning when possible, and increasing gradually from 100 g per litter as intake is observed.
This targeted approach for maximum benefit to operations is further stressed given the creep intake in the studies varies between 40 to 65 per cent in variation.
The post Keep creep feeding for piglets simple appeared first on Farmtario.
