What happens in the nursery is critical for post-weaning success
Dr. Jason Woodworth, research professor at Kansas State University, spoke to attendees at the Annual Four Star Pork Industry Conference held in Muncie, Indiana in September 2024. His message focused on getting pigs off to a strong start in the nursery and setting them up for success post-weaning.
Preweaning management
Think about the first 24 hours of a piglet’s life. If you can get an adequate amount of colostrum into newborn piglets, you have a pretty good chance of keeping all the pigs alive.
“It’s when you start getting into situations where we’re not managing colostrum intake on the front side, especially for those little pigs, where you see the importance of additional amounts of colostrum being able to increase livability,” said Dr. Woodworth. “We are looking at split suckling and other colostrum management strategies that can play an important role on the performance of your pigs post-weaning all the way up to marketing.”
Creep feed
When porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) hit, a lot of creep feed was taken out of the farrowing houses. But as producers consider increasing weaning ages, creep feeding is starting to make a comeback.
The chart below is based off a review of trials looking at factors influencing creep feed intake in the farrowing house.
- The blue bars show if sows were restricted on feed versus ad lib. The amount of feed didn’t have any influence on creep feed intake.
- The orange bars show the type of feeder that the creep feed was placed in, and it played a big role. Having a feeder that attracts the pigs will stimulate creep feed intake.
- The purple bars show creep feeding duration, and increasing the duration of creep feeding will increase feed intake.
“I just came back from Europe last week and they’re pushing 28-day weans, and a lot of those strategies include a 14-day creep feed window. Their goal is 0.5 lb. to 1 lb. of creep feed intake per pig on a 28-day wean,” he said. “The challenge is proper management of the creep feed. It’s pretty easy to throw a lot of money in the pit if we’re over feeding pigs and providing creep feed for too long, so we need to ensure that what is being offered to the pig is being consumed.”
In the data chart below:
- The blue bars show that there was no difference in flavoring in the creep feed.
- The purple bars show the complexity of the creep feed that’s offered does play a role in feed intake. A more complex diet that’s similar to the first nursery diet tends to increase the percentage of creep eaters versus the piglets that are offered a simple diet.
- The blue and red bars show that play feeders, which have been popping up especially in Europe, do influence eating. A play feeder is simply a creep feeder that has either rope or cloth tied on, and it does nothing more than attract the piglets to the creep feeder.
Kansas State conducted a trial on a Minnesota farm where three days prior to weaning (21-day weaning farm) the team offered no creep feed to the piglets, or they offered creep feed that was formulated like the first nursery diet but in either a standard 5/32 inch pellet or a large pellet that was about a 0.5 inch in diameter and about 1.5 inches long. A fourth treatment was simply offering some lactation feed on the mat instead of creep feed, which would be an easier and more biosecure option if it worked.
The chart below shows the average daily gain (ADG) in the nursery after three days of creep feeding in the farrowing house.
“We saw an increase in the average daily gain in the nursery on a per-pig-placed basis with the standard pellet, and it was even better with the large pelleted creep feed,” he said. “It was really intriguing to watch because those pigs would find those pellets, and it was just like a dog with a bone. They would take it up, and they were running around that crate and have a lot of fun with those large pellets.”
The improvement in gain on a per-pig-placed basis was driven by lower nursery mortality and removals when pigs were offered creep feed at the end of lactation.
He said the surprise was the reduction in performance when they offered lactation feed on the mat.
“We don’t fully understand what happened there as pigs offered the lactation diet had increased nursery mortality. I know there’s at least one integrator’s data set that would not agree with this. The simplicity of the lactation feed versus the complexity of the first nursery diet could possibly have caused some of this reduction in performance, but also it was a difference of offering lactation diet in meal form versus the pelleted creep feed” he said.
How we provide creep feed to the piglets in the farrowing crate can also influence performance. The diagram above is set up as a farrowing crate, and the black box is the sow feeder at the front. If you place the creep feeder up close to the head of the sow, it will increase wean weights compared to if the creep feeder is placed in the back of the crate or if it didn’t have any creep feed at all.
“If your farrowing house is set up where the sow feeder is close to the wall and not a walkway, it makes it more difficult to be able to properly manage the creep feeder, but this data would show it is worth doing it correctly,” he said. “There are more studies coming out of Europe as well, but there does seem to be an association that when the piglet sees the sow eating, it learns to consume the feed in the creep feed too.”
Weaning age
A change to weaning age is hard to implement but makes a big, big impact on pig performance. Research from Dr. Adam Moser’s lab at Michigan State shows that an older weaned pig has better gut integrity which can improve performance for the remainder of that pig’s life.
Dr. Dean Boyd studied the influence of weaning age on wean-to-finish mortality in pigs from 18 to 24 days of age in both a poor health challenge flow and a good health challenge flow. Incrementally, every additional day of wean age showed a lower weaned-to-finish mortality regardless of whether it be in poor health or good health.
“When we start thinking about wean age, we often think about pigs that we push out of the door at the farrowing house and forget about the consequences post-wean in the whole flow of the system,” he said. “As we look at the economics, we need to make sure we’re considering pigs that are actually marketed versus only those that are exiting the farrowing house.”
“We did a study in Minnesota that looked at three different wean ages. We fed diets that were a NAE (no antibiotics ever) type of a formulation versus an antibiotics-allowed formulation just at the nursery,” he said. “As we increased wean age, the number of pigs we treated and the number of injections that we had to provide reduced about 3% for every additional weaning age day.”
A later weaning age creates a healthier pig and a pig that’s better able to survive, and for every additional day of wean age, it resulted in about 1.5 lbs. of additional weight sold per pig weaned.
“The value of additional wean age helps from a nursery management standpoint and from a total economic flow based on lower mortality in the wean-to-finish system in most situations,” he said.
Emphasize sanitation
“It goes without saying that when you put pigs in the right environment, they’re going to do better. ‘Do what’s right for the pig’ was a comment that really needs to be hit home today,” he said. “But this is something that’s easier said than done. When dumping a nursery, the team is trying to get it cleaned as fast as they can, so they can put pigs right back into it the next day. But the focus must be on really making sure we’re getting feeders and waters as clean as possible.”
Dr. Woodworth offers the following tips:
- Use a detergent
- Use hot water – it makes a big difference in knocking down coli
- Heat and dry buildings before restocking
- If you have problem barns:
- Try whitewashing between groups, and incrementally it’ll help knock down some of the bacteria.
- Extending the time before restocking will also help
In a study looking at a good cleaning situation in the nursery versus a poor cleaning situation, in the clean barn there was better ADG, improved feed efficiency and fewer days of scours.
“When we think about properly cleaning the barn, what we see may not tell the entire story,” he said. “The reality is that even if we do a really good job power washing and disinfecting, we still have a hard time eliminating bacteria from the environment.”
In a trial where the research team swabbed the facility before doing the cleaning and disinfection protocol and after cleaning. The chart below shows the amount of E. coli observed within the environment.
“Cleaning definitely reduced the overall E. coli load in the environment, but we didn’t bring it down to zero by any means,” he said. “The highest amount of E. coli was still present after the cleaning on the mats and in the feeders and the cup waters – all places we’re hoping these pigs go as soon they’re weaned.”
He said it’s easy to power wash the floors of the pens, but it’s hard to get in all of the spaces that are harboring E. coli. However, it’s important to do a “white glove” test in the areas that are known problem spots to ensure they are really getting clean. Improved sanitation will help set pigs up for success in the nursery.
Other research also looked at the impact of farrowing house sanitation on sow and piglet performance. In a recent trial, the research team compared a basic power wash in a farrowing house to a soap detergent power wash, where they also washed the sows.
“As expected, the increased sanitation in the farrowing house resulted in reduced lactation mortalities in both the first 2 days of lactation and from birth to wean. In the farrowing house, they also had lower amounts of diarrhea, fewer clinical disease cases and fewer antibiotic injections,” he said.
Interestingly, nursery pig performance after weaning improved from pigs that were weaned from the advanced cleaning farrowing house protocol. Those pigs also showed improved ADG and increased weaning weights and weights at the end of the nursery period.
“What we’re doing in the farrowing house even from a cleaning perspective before the sows were even loaded into farrow is influencing their offspring performance in the nursery after weaning,” he said. “Going back to the teamwork approach, tying everybody in the whole group together to fight E. coli at the same level is really a key.”
Early and continuous intake
Looking at the feed intake of the piglets for the first three days after nursery, this study selected the pigs with the highest third of feed intake for the first three days after weaning and compared it to the lowest third. The chart below shows the average daily gain for different periods throughout the nursery.
The pigs that had higher average feed intake for the first three days had better performance throughout the whole nursery period.
“What was really interesting to see though is that, when they euthanized some of these pigs at the end of the study, the pigs that had the highest feed intake for the first three days had the highest villus height and had a deeper crypt, and the surface area in the villi was greater,” he explained.
“This is really important because the villi are the surfaces inside the intestine that absorb all the nutrients. So a higher villus height and a higher surface area allows for increased absorptive capacity, which allows for a better ability to capture nutrients out of the feed and means less undigested nutrients going to the hind gut ultimately reducing the E. coli challenges that we have.”
Pushing those first three days of feed intake and stimulating pigs to be able to get on feed will lead to better growth performance and better gut health during the whole wean-to-finish process.
