Can hybrid rye replace wheat in swine diets?

Modern rye hybrids are less susceptible to ergot contamination than traditional rye, and has greater yield compared with wheat grain, which was a good incentive to evaluate feeding hybrid rye to grow-finish hogs. Rye is known to have greater fibre content than wheat grain, consisting of complex gummy sugars that could be made more digestible/fermentable to pigs by the inclusion of feed NSP enzymes. In a commercial scale growout trial, we evaluated feeding increasing hybrid rye inclusions replacing either one third, two thirds or all of the wheat, and we tested whether or not NSP enzymes would make the hybrid rye grain more digestible to hogs.

The results showed that hybrid rye can completely replace wheat in growout hog diets without affecting feed efficiency, carcass traits, feed cost per hog or feed cost per kg of body weight gain, and profit per hog. Including feed NSP enzymes tended to improve weight gain over the entire trial. NSP enzyme inclusion improved feed efficiency, but only for hogs fed the high rye diets replacing all of the wheat. It is, therefore, recommended to include NSP enzymes for diets containing high levels (45 – 65% of the diet) of rye. Assuming 2700 kg greater hybrid fall rye yield than wheat grain, an additional 13 hogs more (30 to 130 kg live) could be fed per hectare (5 more hogs fed per acre) at ~200 kg (441 lb) cereal grain intake per hog.