Research conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc indicates including straw in the diets of gestating sows helps increase satiety, potentially reducing aggression, and improves the digestibility of energy.
To avoid the negative consequences of sows becoming overweight during gestation, the amount of feed given is limited resulting in the possibility of aggression during feeding in group housing satiations.
To improve satiety and reduce the potential for aggression researchers working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc have been looking at supplementing the diet with processed straw.
Dr. Atta Agyekum, a Post Doctoral Researcher in Nutrition with the Prairie Swine Centre, says a standard gestation sow diet was used, supplemented with 10 percent processed wheat or oat straw.
I would say the impact in terms of aggression, we did not really see that much in terms of our experiment. Usually the sows are fed in the morning individually in their crates and then they are allowed to go into group settings. This is different from what you would see in some farms where the sows are fed using electronic feeding stations. We think aggression would be higher in those instances compared to ours. So if our feeding strategy or the management that we have is applied to such a setting then it will, we believe, be able to improve or reduce aggression.
In terms of satiety, we actually saw some improvement in some of the hormones that have been associated with satiety when we fed them the processed straws. And what we found was that the oat straw, when it was processed, had a greater effect on satiety and some of the production parameters that we measured for the gestating sows compared to the wheat straw.
~ Dr. Atta Agyekum, Prairie Swine Centre
Dr. Agyekum says, in addition to improving satiety, the inclusion of straw in the diet improved energy digestibility which suggests application of this technology will also improve the overall energy intake of the sows.
