Effect of flavor additives on nursery performance of piglets

• Grant number: 21/04983-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2021
• End date: September 30, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Animal Husbandry - Animal Nutrition and Feeding
• Principal Investigator: Cesar Augusto Pospissil Garbossa
• Grantee: Heng Li Kao Junior
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia (FMVZ). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The nursery phase is a challenging time for the piglets. The first days are highly stressful, with the weaning, batch mixing, hierarchy reorganization, and adaptation to a new environment, but one of the biggest challenges in this new phase is the piglets' feed change, moving from a highly palatable liquid food to a lowly palatable solid feed. With that in mind, the use of flavoring in nursery feed is interesting for stimulating the piglets' feed consumption and ensuring a good development in this phase. This study aims to evaluate the flavoring OPTISWEET STS's and the diet complexity diet on the performance of piglets in the nursery phase. With this objective, 192 weaned piglets will be separated into four groups in a factorial squeme 2 X 2 (complex feed and simple feed) X (with and without flavoring), this way the treatments will be distributed as RCF (complex feed with flavoring), RCS (complex feed without flavoring), RSF (simple feed with flavoring), and RSS (simple feed without flavoring). The analyzed variables will be average daily consumption, daily weight gain, food conversion, animal behavior, dry matter digestibility at the end of the nursery phase, and economic viability. As the experiment has not started yet, it is not possible to draw any conclusions, but the expectation is to observe relevant differences between the groups, where the animals in the groups with the addition of flavoring present better performance due to the greater interest in the feed, as well as the complexity of the diet influences the performance of the animals. (AU)