How and what to feed pigs: feeding basics, diet and fattening methods

The profitability of pig farming directly depends on the correct feeding of animals and the rate of their weight gain. To effectively develop a farm, it is important to know what and how to feed piglets for rapid growth.

Feeds for rapid weight gain occupy a central position in the home feeding strategy, since they are the key factor in increasing the pig population.

To get high-quality meat, you start with the right choice of piglet for fattening.

Selected according to the following criteria:

• age - from 1 to 2 months, until this moment the young animals need mother's milk;
• weight - 5-7 kg by the first month of life, by the second - 14-18 kg;
• appearance - active, with soft, smooth stubble, shiny, mobile eyes;
• snout, mucous membranes of the mouth, skin - pink, tail - dry, clean, loop-shaped, hoof horn - clean, shiny;
• exterior - long body, straight, wide back, strong bones, well-set limbs, heavy head, straight profile with a slight bend;
• appetite is normal, the piglet should grab the food and not suck.

What to feed newborn piglets?

First feed for piglets

(prestarter) is offered from 5-7 days of life. The purpose of this is to teach animals to eat compound feed. Prestarter is offered 5-6 times a day in small portions. You can also give piglets peat, ensiled corn grain or extruded grain, but be sure to be of the highest quality and hygiene!

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Types of feed and their daily consumption rates

When choosing a breed of pigs for fattening, you need to know in advance what you are going to feed them, since the diet will depend on the breed. Table 1 shows which feeds are recommended for different breeds of pigs.

Table 1

Sick animals should not be fed for meat, especially if they are infected with tuberculosis, Finnosis, infectious and inflammatory diseases.

Farmers use different feeds and products to fatten pigs. The complex of feed provided should provide the animal with energy and a full range of nutrients.

Leaning on fiber - bran, the pig spends a lot of energy on digestion. Therefore, such food should be given in limited quantities. Most of the feed should be concentrated feed. Violation of this principle leads to a negative result - the pig does not gain weight.

The feed given to pigs is divided into 3 main groups, each of them has a different effect on the taste and quality of the meat. The influence of feed groups on the quality of meat and lard is shown in Table 2.

table 2

Group No. 3 is excluded from the diet 2 months before slaughter.

Concentrated feed

Concentrated feed is crushed feed made from cereals, bran, legumes, and grain processing waste. This food provides animals with energy, and legumes provide proteins.

The most popular crop for fattening is barley. It is digestible by 80% and improves the taste of pork. Composition of concentrated feed:

• oats - they are given only at the initial stage of fattening;
• millet;
• corn - it is mixed with food containing protein;
• steamed peas;
• cake and meal (soybean, sunflower, flaxseed);
• bran - you can’t give too much because of the high fiber content.

Concentrated feed is given in crushed form.

Remember when feeding livestock:

• Finely ground turd is given only in combination with food waste or succulent food - this prevents disruption of the stomach and intestines.
• Grain feed is not boiled - heat treatment leads to the destruction of active substances.
• Beans must be boiled - they are poorly digestible in their raw form.

The feeding standards for pigs with concentrated feed are presented in Table 3.

Table 3

Juicy food

The most valuable succulent crop is potatoes. It is absorbed by 94%. Potatoes are given mixed with protein-containing food - peas. Potatoes are given boiled. Among the succulent feeds fed to pigs:

• Boiled beets.
• Carrots are needed by suckling piglets.
• Pumpkin – given to all age groups.

Food waste

To feed livestock you can use:

• uneaten food;
• crackers;
• waste remaining after cutting fish and animals;
• raw and boiled vegetables;
• cleaning fruits and root vegetables.

Before slaughter - several weeks before, you need to remove fish waste from the diet, otherwise the meat will become tasteless.

The waste is placed in clean containers and given to the pigs.

The diet of pigs can be varied with acorns. One individual is given up to 2 kg per day. Pigs will not refuse mushrooms either - they are placed dried or boiled in mash.

Green food

The most important herb in pig nutrition is nettle. It can be mowed anywhere, it grows everywhere. Nettles are harvested for winter food by drying young shoots. Portion – 300 g per day.

After 6 hours, the chopped green mass loses half of its benefits. If nettle is left brewed to cool, it can cause intoxication.

Another valuable green crop is rapeseed. It contains a lot of proteins and fats. Thanks to rapeseed cake, animal growth is accelerated by 4%. Rapeseed contains much more phosphorus, magnesium, calcium and copper than soybeans. If you want to increase the profitability of fattening, it is better to replace sunflower and soybeans with rapeseed.

It is useful to feed pigs “green stuff” - this is grass and leaves in crushed form. Components of the green stuff:

• peas;
• oats;
• quinoa;
• nettle;
• alfalfa;
• clover;
• beet tops.

In winter, instead of green fodder, combined silage is given. It is prepared for future use from the following ingredients:

• fresh grass;
• vegetable waste;
• roots;
• chaff;
• hay or grass flour;
• carrot.

Animal products

Pigs fattened for meat can be given animal feed:

• Milk. Only sucklings are fed undiluted milk. Adult animals are fed buttermilk, skim milk, and whey.
• Fish or meat. They give it for the sake of protein. You can donate animal and fish waste. The fed fish must be boiled.

Yeast feed

Yeast contains a lot of vitamins and proteins, which are almost completely absorbed by the body. The productivity of weight gain, thanks to yeast feed, increases many times over. They produce special yeast - feed yeast. Table 4 shows the composition of yeast.

Table 4

Tips for beginners:

• It is recommended to ferment 30% of the feed or more. For example, if you give a pig 2 kg of feed mixture per day, then 600 g of feed must be mixed with a yeast additive.
• You can replace feed yeast with baker's or brewer's yeast.

What supplements are needed?

By flavoring food with additives - flavoring and aromatic, it is possible to improve digestion and the secretion of gastric juice - by irritating the receptors. Aromatic oils are used to activate taste buds:

• citrus fruits – lemon, tangerine;
• cinnamon;
• sage;
• caraway;
• dill.

The pig family will not refuse to taste sweets. To give the pigs a taste pleasure, the following is added to their food:

• 2.5% sugar;
• 5% ground dry beets.

Pigs prefer sour tastes to alkaline ones. To create it, organic or inorganic acids are added to food - lactic or acetic, within 0.4% of the serving weight. To add bitterness to the food, add 0.15% mustard or 0.4% calcium chloride.

For better digestibility and desire to eat, animals are given food with sweet, sour or bitter additives. Among the important additives is citric acid. In the body it performs the following functions:

• reducing the risk of infection;
• normalization of pH levels;
• high-quality digestion of food;
• normalization of microflora.

The addition of citric acid allows you to increase weight gain by 9-17%. Recommended content is 1% of the feed weight.

Pigs are given mineral supplements - the following is added to the feed:

• ash or coal;
• calcareous tuff;
• chalk;
• eggshell.

Small doses of antibiotics must be added to the feed - they reduce the incidence of disease and increase weight gain by 15%. The drugs used are Biovit-20, Terravit-40 and others. They should be given after consultation with a veterinarian.

Why do you need flax supplements?

Pure flax cannot be given to pigs. But flax is given in small doses for diarrhea, as it has a strengthening effect. Large doses deteriorate the quality of meat and lard - they acquire a yellowish tint and emit a fishy smell.

But flaxseed cake is very useful for pigs. He contains:

• protein – 28%;
• moisture – 11%;
• fat – 9%;
• extractives.

When the cake swells in water, mucus is released, which protects the walls of the stomach from irritation.

Feed control

When, in addition to SSM, liquid by-products of the food industry are fed as wet components, once a year, at the beginning of the main feeding season, for example, in the fall after laying the SSM, it is necessary to carry out planned feed control (plan-to-fact comparison). During this control, it is necessary to check and ensure that the chosen feeding strategy, aimed at the proper level of productivity and environmental protection, actually works and reaches the feeder, and the desired productivity is real.

Systematic feed control should be carried out once a year

This type of control is especially recommended when using components in which large fluctuations in nutrient content are observed. More often than not, food processing by-products fall into this category rather than grains and/or SSM. The more this feed control pays off in order to guarantee high productivity.

Scheme of systematic feed control

Step 1. All feed compositions are calculated and checked against the established requirements for the content of nutrients, minerals and active components. If there are significant deviations between planned and actual indicators, the farmer immediately receives a notification with proposals to change the composition. To calculate the composition of feed, the most current results of laboratory studies of individual feed raw materials should be used.

Step 2 . At least one of the mixed feeds is submitted for analysis to an independent laboratory. A feed sample is taken from the feed pipe with a special probe and sent for testing as quickly as possible.

Step 3. The research results are compared with the previously compiled recipe calculation. Depending on the results of the comparison, conclusions are drawn regarding the accuracy of mixing the feed and the correct assessment of the nutritional value of the components, especially those grown in-house. When comparing the analyzed content of nutrients and minerals, so-called non-significant deviations are taken into account. They must be assessed on a special scale. And in no case should they differ from the permissible values. If minor deviations do not exceed the norm, this means a very good agreement between calculation and analysis. If they exceed the norm, you need to look for the reasons for this.

Article by Gerhard Stalljohann and Josef Möllering, Münster. Translation by Elena Babenko specifically for the soft-agro.com project

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Is it possible to feed flax to pigs?

Flax meal is introduced into feed mixtures for all types of animals: pigs 5–10%, cattle of all age groups 15–20%, adult poultry 10–12% (at the same time, flax and its processed products are not recommended to be fed to broilers according to VNITIP recommendations), young animals birds 6–8%.

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Feeding phases

Fattening pigs involves single or multi-phase feeding:

• Single-phase feeding. This method does not take into account the nuances of the livestock. The piglets are gradually transferred to the diet of fattened pigs. The animal body receives more proteins than it needs, and there is also an excess of phosphorus and nitrogen. The downside is the high cost of feed.
• Multiphase nutrition takes into account the needs of the body. A more complex option, but profitable. As individuals grow, they eat more, but they no longer require as much protein as at the beginning. The multiphase method involves reducing the proportion of nutrients and the release of phosphorus and nitrogen by 20%. With a two-phase method, feed changes occur when the animal reaches 70 kg, with a three-phase method - 30-60 kg, 60-90 kg, 90 kg and more.

How to prepare food?

Any feed requires some kind of preparation before being given to pigs. Thanks to feed processing:

• their nutritional value increases;
• their digestibility improves;
• they are disinfected.

There are several methods for preparing feed:

• Mechanical. The ingredients are crushed, crushed and mixed. The nutritional value and palatability of feed increases.
• Chemical. The ingredients are treated with alkali or acid - this method is used for difficult-to-digest substances.
• Biological . It consists of a partial change in the chemical composition. Achieved by silage, fermentation, germination, etc.

Preparing vegetables

Potatoes are the main fodder root crop. Piggies do not digest raw potatoes well; it is recommended to boil and mash them. Potatoes are given to pigs mixed with grain or green feed.

The water in which the potatoes were boiled is drained - it is harmful to pigs, as it contains poisonous solanine.

Other vegetables - beets, carrots, pumpkin, grate on a coarse grater before serving. They are given raw. Rub before eating. You should not make preparations - the vegetables spoil and become inedible.

Vegetables and root crops become more nutritious after processing, and animals digest them better. Beets and pumpkin can be boiled, and boiling water can also be given.

Hay and dust

In order for roughage - hay and hay dust - to be better digested in the stomachs of pigs, they are steamed with boiling water for 2-3 hours. Before steaming, the hay is crushed.

Cereals

The most difficult thing is to prepare the grain. You should not give either dry or raw grain to pigs - there will be no benefit from it. At a minimum, the grain needs to be ground. The finer the grind, the more benefits there will be.

What you need to know about grain grinding:

• Oats and corn are ground as needed - there is no need to store them for future use, since the fat contained in the grains, oxidizing, makes the ground grain rancid.
• Beans and lentils must be boiled - without this, their digestibility is minimal.

Before giving the ground grain to suckling piglets, it is first roasted until dark brown.

To increase the nutritional value, the grain is germinated in boxes under the sun. The grains are watered for 10 days. You can give grain when the sprouts grow to 10 cm in length. This food is usually given to piglets and sows.

Green food

Green grass is not given to pigs without pre-treatment. It is thoroughly crushed so that there are no dry, coarse stems in the green mass. It is not recommended to harvest grass for future use - it will become lethargic, may rot, and there will be no benefit from such food.

Combisilos

To prepare combisilos, beets, cabbage, carrots, lupines, as well as green mass of legumes and corn are chopped. Important points for preparing combisilos:

• All vegetables and herbs have a period in which they are best ensiled - when the maximum benefit can be extracted: corn is ensiled when it reaches milky-waxy maturity;
• lupine and peas - before flowering;
• Jerusalem artichoke, pumpkin, carrots - after full ripening.

Table 5 presents several popular combisilage recipes:

Table 5

Prohibited Products

Pigs should not be fed:

• Products with traces of mold, parasites, fungi.
• Herbs that can cause poisoning. One-month-old piglets should not be fed: horse dill;
• black nightshade;
• caustic buttercup;
• milkweed;
• hemlock;
• dog parsley.

To fatten a pig at home, you will have to tinker. If you don’t listen to the advice of experienced pig breeders, you risk wasting more feed than you need and getting low-quality products. Get ready to strictly adhere to the diet and diet, and then breeding pigs will bring you the desired profit.

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Know your indicators!

Although the examples of calculations provided can serve as a good guide, each enterprise must send its own SMS to the laboratory for analysis. Anyone who does not do this is feeding blindly and should not be surprised when high-quality SCM does not produce the expected animal performance.

Accurate data on the dry matter content of SSM is especially important. Because the success of adding other diet ingredients and adjusting the dry matter content in the feed line depends on this value. If, with a dry matter content of 65% dry matter, 2.1 kg of water per kg of the main mixture with protein carrier (38% crude protein) is added to feed from 35 kg live weight, then for a dry matter content of 55% only 1 .9 kg of water.

conclusions

1. Compound feed for piglets, adult pigs and sows has a different composition according to state regulations and recipes. Food cannot be substituted for different age groups. Read about feed for piglets in this article.
2. The basis of fattening is always grains: barley, wheat, oats. Corn and peas are also used.
3. Compound feed can be of 2 types: concentrate, which is used as an additive, and complete feed.
4. In addition to feed, the diet of pigs includes vegetables - potatoes, beets, and greens. In summer, when raising pigs, you can graze.
5. Compound feed is used in any suitable form: dry food, wet, liquid, granular. The shape is chosen according to the age of the animal.
6. Compound feed can be prepared according to the recipe on your own, provided that you have the necessary ingredients for preparation in sufficient quantities.

Compound

Each feed for piglets contains turd. It can be made from one type of culture or different ones. Typically the mixture is created using the following products:

• Wheat. They are used to create various feedstuffs for piglets with sows, and also for those animals that are being raised. The mixture contains the amino acid lysine. It promotes normal growth and good weight gain.
• Corn. It can be used to create a feed mixture for animals of any age. Corn is considered quite high in calories; it contains a huge amount of protein, vitamins and minerals.
• Barley. Gives a powerful charge of strength and energy. When compound feed is prepared for piglets, barley without husks is used, because it can have a negative effect on the gastrointestinal tract.
• Oats. This product is best used to prepare a feed mixture intended for sows and newly weaned cubs. Oats are high in protein and protein. Much more than in barley.

As we noted above, the feed should be different for piglets, sows and boars for slaughter. Let's look at which one:

• For young animals. Before talking about the composition, it is necessary to note an important nuance about how to properly feed piglets with compound feed: their digestive system is not ready to process rough and cold feed. The consistency of the feed mixture should be like liquid gruel, and the temperature should be about 30 degrees. You can start feeding piglets with compound feed 4-5 days after their birth; it should be based on milk powder and barley flour (40%). The feed should also contain fish, legume and grass meal, premix, calcium carbonate, and a small amount (up to 1.5%) of feed yeast. From the age of one and a half months, bran, corn flour, and alfalfa can be added to the feed for piglets.
• For adults. Here it is necessary to make a reservation that the food should be special - stimulating weight gain. The body of a mature animal can digest any type of feed mixture, so no special preparation is required. The resulting mixture is ideal for a pig. It will provide it with all the necessary minerals, proteins, vegetable fats, and complex carbohydrates. You can use the following feed mixture: 150 g barley, 100 g oats, 250 g wheat, 20 g lime flour, 350 g bran, 5 g premix, 100 g animal protein, 5 g salt.

Feeding ration

The norm for average daily weight gain is considered to be 650 g; at the age of 6 months, the pig reaches 100-120 kg. Costs per 1 kg of weight should not be more than 4 feed units.

Piglets move into the category of “adult pigs” upon reaching a weight of 40-50 kg. Nutrition is selected depending on the purpose of the animal. Let's consider the nutritional features for different categories of pigs.

Feeding boars

When fattening boars, it is important to control their condition - emaciated or obese individuals lose sexual activity and productivity. During the breeding season, animals need to increase the amount of feed, as their metabolism accelerates.

If boars are limited in copulation, nutritional standards are reduced by 10-20%. The volume of dry food is measured based on 100 kg of live weight. Growing children receive – 1.6 kg, adults – 1.4 kg. The basis of the menu is cereals, cake, meal, meat and fish waste, peas.

An approximate daily ration for an adult boar is given in Table 14.

Table 14

Feeding suckling sows

The farrowing sow, immediately after the appearance of the piglets, is given plenty of warm water. The first feeding is after 10-12 hours. She is fed liquid mash, which is prepared from:

• oatmeal and wheat bran;
• chalk and table salt - 20-30 g each;

The second feeding is after 5-6 hours. The daily norm is increasing gradually. The sow is transferred to the full feed allowance only by 6-8 days. During the first 10-20 days, the pig is fed liquid feed to enhance lactation. At the end of the first suckling period, the queen is given porridge-like food. Feeding suckling queens - twice a day.

During the suckling period, it is recommended to give per day:

• legume hay flour – 2-3 kg;
• potatoes – 3.5 kg;
• root vegetables – 4-5 kg;
• silage – 2-3 kg;
• concentrates – 3-5 kg;
• return – 2-4 l.

An approximate diet for lactating sows is given in Table 15. Data for a pig weighing 180-200 kg, nursing a dozen piglets.

Table 15

Feeding single and pregnant sows

Their fertilization, fertility and health of newborns depend on the quality of feeding of single queens. It is important to provide a high-quality diet, starting with preparation for mating. The egg matures in 20-22 days. That is, preparation of the uterus should begin a month before mating.

The diet of single queens should include:

• food rich in protein - fish waste, small fish (serrat), various seafood, flaxseed cake;
• concentrated feed;
• clover hay;
• silage;
• potato;
• carrot.

In the second half of pregnancy, they begin to provide feed of the highest quality. Towards the end of the period, the amount of roughage and succulent food is gradually reduced. Half a month before the birth of piglets, the pig is fed skim milk - 0.5-1 liters. 3-5 days before the interview they stop giving milk. The amount of feed is reduced to 50% of the diet. Diets for single and pregnant sows - in the first and second half of pregnancy - are given in Tables 16 and 17, respectively.

Table 16

Table 17

Read more about feeding pregnant sows here.