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Primiparous lactating sows have lower feed intake than multiparous sows, which results in insufficient energy and nutrient ingestion, causes excess body weight loss and oxidative stress, and compromises the weight gain of their progeny. Strategies to increase the intake of energy, such as greater energy concentration in their diet or improved feed intake and digestibility through the addition of flavor and multi-enzymes, should be beneficial for sow performance. This study aimed to explore how a high-quality diet or a flavor plus multi-enzyme diet affect the feed intake, nutrient digestibility and antioxidation capacity of lactating sows and the growth of their progeny. For that purpose, thirty primiparous sows were randomly assigned to three treatments from day 2 of lactation until weaning (day 21): control, with a basal diet; high quality, with 200 kcal/kg higher net energy than control; or the control diet supplemented with 500 mg/kg flavor and 100 mg/kg multi-enzymes.
As a result, sows fed with the high quality or flavor+multi-enzymes diets improved piglets’ live weight and average daily weight gain, litter weight gain and piglet growth to milk yield ratio. Compared with the control, the high quality and flavor+multi-enzymes groups increased the digestibility of ether extract, ash, neutral detergent fiber, crude fiber and phosphorus, and the high quality group also increased dry matter, gross energy, crude protein, acid detergent fiber and energy intake. Compared with the control, the flavor+multi-enzymes group decreased serum urea nitrogen and aspartate aminotransferase and enhanced superoxide dismutase, catalase and glutathione peroxidase, but it decreased malondialdehyde in milk supernatant.
To sum up, it was found that feeding on either high-quality or flavor plus multi-enzyme diets both improved sow feed digestibility and consequently increased the growth of piglets. In addition, the flavor plus multi-enzyme diet also improved the antioxidant capacity and health of sows. The data suggest that dietary supplementation with flavor and multi-enzymes may be more promising than a high-quality diet from a health and economic perspective like enhancing utilization of cereal by-products and thus reducing expenditure of corn and soybeans.
Zhe L, Zhou R, Theil PK, Krogh U, Yang L, Zhuo Y, Lin Y, Xu S, Jiang X, Huang L, Che L, Feng B, Wu D, Fang Z. The Impact of Enhancing Diet Quality or Dietary Supplementation of Flavor and Multi-Enzymes on Primiparous Lactating Sows. Animals. 2022; 12(12): 1493. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12121493
