The effects of medium chain fatty acids as alternatives to zinc oxide or carbadox in nursery pig performance

Abstract

There is an increased consumer pressure to limit the use of feed based antibiotic in nursery pig diets. A total of 360 weanling pigs (DNA 200×400; 5.4 ± 0.07 kg) were used in a 35-d growth experiment with 6 treatments to evaluate MCFA as an alternative to ZnO or carbadox to examine the outcome of their ADG, BW, ADFI, and G:F. A completely randomized design was conducted using 10 replicates pens per treatment with 6 pigs per pen. The treatments were 1) control; 2) 3,000 ppm ZnO in Phase 1 and 1,500 ppm ZnO in Phase 2; 3) 50 g/ton carbadox; 4) 1% blend of C6:C8:C10; 5) 1% Feed Energy R2 (Feed Energy Corp, Des Moines, IA); 6) 1% FORMI GML (ADDCON, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Germany). The data was analyzed using the GLIMMIX procedure of SAS (SAS Inst., Cary, NC) with pens being the Experiential Unit. The treatment diets had two phases, Phase 1 d 0 to 7, Phase 2 d 8 to 19, with a common diet fed from d 20 to 35. From d 0 to 19, pens fed ZnO or carbadox had greater (P<0.05) ADG than pens fed control or R2. The overall treatment shows there was no significant change in the G:F (P=0.320). The results of this experiment suggest that feeding ZnO and carbadox will have ahigher ADG (P=0.012) and ADFI (P=0.001) in weanling pigs. FORMI GML had a similar growth performance, however additional research is needed to confirm if certain MCFA could replace feed-based antibiotics in commercial swine production.