Animal Science - Swine Nutrition
Impact of Finishing Facility Environment on Feed Efficiency
March 21, 2025By Suzanne Leonard
Mortality, feed efficiency, and growth rates vary between groups of wean-to-finish pigs. It is broadly understood that indoor environment and management factors impact pig performance, but there is a lack of empirical, farm-based data to quantify the impact of each factor under commercial production conditions. To address this need, sensor technologies not commonly found in commercial finishing barns were deployed to monitor barn environmental conditions.
Animal Science
Creating a sustainability index for the United States swineindustry through stochastic modeling
January 20, 2025By Jeffrey Wiegert
Scientific Abstract Nutrient requirements of growing-finishing pigs are influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including feed intake, metabolism, and environmental conditions. To better...
Animal Science
Use of Hybrid Rye in Diets for Growing and Reproducing Pigs: A Literature Review and Determination of Green-House Gas Emissions.
December 20, 2024By Hans H. Stein
The objective of this project was to evaluate the nutritional value of hybrid rye as an alternative to corn in pig diets and to assess its impact on greenhouse gas emissions and nitrogen (N) excretion in pig manure.
Animal Science - Swine Nutrition
Increasing Feed Efficiency by Attenuating the Transportation Stress Response in Nursery Piglets through L-Tryptophan Supplementation
April 2, 2024By John Scott Radcliffe
The objective of this experiment was to mitigate the adverse effects of early life transport stress on subsequent immune challenges by providing supplemental Tryptophan (Trp) during the nursery period.
Animal Science - Sow Lifetime Productivity
Utilization of an Advanced Computer Vision Platform to Identify Changes in the Physiological and Behavioral Changes Associated with Illness and Aggressive/Damaging Behavior During the Nursery and Finisher Phase
December 22, 2023By Ty B. Schmidt
Overall results indicate that precision livestock technology has the ability to provide accurate identification of compromised pigs and there is potential for precision livestock technology to provide caretakers with an early-alert system for the identification of compromised pigs.
Animal Science - Swine Nutrition
Evaluation of Late Finishing Space Allowance and Marketing Strategy and the Strategic use of Hyper-Doses of Phytase to Improve Production Performance and Profits
September 19, 2023By Eric Van Heugten
This project was designed to evaluate the impacts that hyper-dosing levels of phytase (defined here as 4,500 to 5,000 FTU/kg of feed) on growth performance, carcass characteristics, and serum chemistry of late-finishing pigs housed under space restriction or marketed using two different marketing strategies.
Animal Science
Assessing the effects of farrowing crate design and mothering phenotype on pre-weaning piglet survival and performance using imaging technologies
June 7, 2023By Tami Brown-Brandl
Actual piglet mortality is a combination of a set of complex interactions between sow, piglet, environmental, and management factors. While crushing by the sow may be the ultimate cause of piglet mortality, there are many factors influencing the outcome, including hypothermia, starvation, and others. This study’s goals were to create a better environment for the piglets and the sow and to work towards methods of selecting sows with better mothering ability.
Animal Science - Swine Nutrition
Improving feed efficiency of growing to finishing pigs fed high DDGS containing diet with different branched-chain amino acids to lysine ratio
March 4, 2023By Ryan Samuel
Corn distillers dried grains with solubles (cDDGS) can replace portions of corn and soybean meal (SBM) in swine diets. However, high dietary inclusions of cDDGS can reduce growth performance, which...
Animal Science
An Integrated Approach to Improve While Herd Pig Survivability
March 4, 2023By Dr. Kara Stewart
Pre-weaning survival in US herds ranges from 80-90% with the majority of the death loss occurring in the first three days after birth from crushing from the dam. Risk factors for mortality are low...
