Yeonwoo

Digestible and metabolizable energy in soybean meal and soybean hulls when fed to growing pigs or sows

Values for digestible energy (DE) and metabolizable energy (ME) in feed ingredients are usually determined in growing pigs and subsequently applied to all groups of pigs. Results of recent research, however, indicate that the energy content of soybean meal (SBM) is greater than previously thought when fed to growing pigs. This increase in energy may be due to changes in the pigs themselves or differences in methodology, but there are no recent experiments assessing DE and ME in SBM when fed to sows. Therefore, it remains unclear if sows also have greater DE and ME in SBM compared with current book values. Likewise, there are no recent data for the DE and ME in soybean hulls although soybean hulls are often added to diets for gestating sows. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that gestating and lactating sows have greater DE and ME in SBM and soybean hulls than growing pigs and that DE and ME in SBM fed to both growing pigs and sows are greater than current book values. The second hypothesis was that there is no difference in apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD) of gross energy (GE) and DE between gestating and lactating sows.

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