Research conducted by the University of Saskatchewan and the Prairie Swine Center has shown, while rye can be included in the rations of grower pigs, it's important to maintain high energy levels in the ration. Researchers with the University of Saskatchewan and the Prairie Swine Center are conducting feeding trials using a new high yielding hybrid variety of rye developed in Germany that's less suspectable to ergot.
Dr. Denise Beaulieu, an Assistant Professor with the university of Saskatchewan and an Adjunct Research Scientist, Nutrition with the Prairie Swine Center, explains, typically when pigs are fed high fibre rations that are slightly energy deficient, they'll consume more feed to compensate but that doesn't appear to happen when rye is included in the diet.
Clip-Dr. Denise Beaulieu-University of Saskatchewan:
We had pigs that were about 60 kilograms of body weight and then they went all the way up to market which is about 130 kilograms of body weight. We fed them diets that were formulated with high and low energy and these were typical diets but some just had a little bit more energy than others.
It would be like a corn-based diet or a wheat-barley based diet and then to each of those diets we included 40 percent rye. We found that, with the high energy diet, the pigs did just fine with the inclusion of 40 percent rye. There was no difference in growth, no difference in feed intake, body weight or carcass composition, but with the low energy diet without rye, so the with the wheat high low energy diet the pigs did just fine, they ate more.
But they didn't compensate with the low energy diet with the high rye. We think it's something to do with this fibre. The take home message to producers would be that the pigs will do fine with 40 to 50 percent rye in the diet but the diets have to be formulated maintaining this higher energy composition.
Source : Farmscape