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Review
. 2021 Jan 25;11(2):302.
doi: 10.3390/ani11020302.

Management and Feeding Strategies in Early Life to Increase Piglet Performance and Welfare around Weaning: A Review

Laia Blavi  1 , David Solà-Oriol  1 , Pol Llonch  1 , Sergi López-Vergé  1 , Susana María Martín-Orúe  1 , José Francisco Pérez  1
Affiliations
Review

Management and Feeding Strategies in Early Life to Increase Piglet Performance and Welfare around Weaning: A Review

Laia Blavi et al. Animals (Basel). .

Abstract

The performance of piglets in nurseries may vary depending on body weight, age at weaning, management, and pathogenic load in the pig facilities. The early events in a pig's life are very important and may have long lasting consequences, since growth lag involves a significant cost to the system due to reduced market weights and increased barn occupancy. The present review evidences that there are several strategies that can be used to improve the performance and welfare of pigs at weaning. A complex set of early management and dietary strategies have been explored in sows and suckling piglets for achieving optimum and efficient growth of piglets after weaning. The management strategies studied to improve development and animal welfare include: (1) improving sow housing during gestation, (2) reducing pain during farrowing, (3) facilitating an early and sufficient colostrum intake, (4) promoting an early social interaction between litters, and (5) providing complementary feed during lactation. Dietary strategies for sows and suckling piglets aim to: (1) enhance fetal growth (arginine, folate, betaine, vitamin B12, carnitine, chromium, and zinc), (2) increase colostrum and milk production (DL-methionine, DL-2-hydroxy-4-methylthiobutanoic acid, arginine, L-carnitine, tryptophan, valine, vitamin E, and phytogenic actives), (3) modulate sows' oxidative and inflammation status (polyunsaturated fatty acids, vitamin E, selenium, phytogenic actives, and spray dried plasma), (4) allow early microbial colonization (probiotics), or (5) supply conditionally essential nutrients (nucleotides, glutamate, glutamine, threonine, and tryptophan).

Keywords: feeding; management; pigs; strategies; weaning.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Effect of birth and weaning body weight until slaughter. The spearman correlation coefficient (ρ) indicates the correlation between body weights at different production phases with the number of days to reach a market body weight of 105 kg. BBW: birth body weight; WBW: weaning body weight; NBW: nursery body weight; MBM: market body weight. † means slaughter house [2,7].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Nutritional strategies and feeding management concepts for maximum colostrum production in gilts and sows [89,168,169].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Post-weaning feed intake (average daily feed intake, ADFI, ♦) and growth (average daily gain, ADG, ●) of piglets categorized as creep-feed eaters (eaters, green), and non-creep-feed eaters (non-eaters, red) [176,177,178,180,181].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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