Hog health | Study shows spray dried animal plasma is beneficial in feed
Researchers have discovered that feeding spray dried animal plasma to nursery pigs can mitigate the harmful effects caused by eating grain infected with fusarium.
Plasma is a component of whole blood and can be purified for use as a feed ingredient.
It is high in protein and is composed mainly of albumin and globulin proteins. Plasma is usually purified from hog or cattle blood and sold as a single or mixed source protein product.
It increases feed intake and performance and can positively affect the morphology of the gastrointestinal tract.
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Deoxynivalenol, or DON, also known as vomitoxin, is a mycotoxin that is produced by fusarium moulds, which are prevalent in cool, temperate regions and often on wheat and barley.
Mycotoxin contamination decreases crop value because contaminated grain is often used as livestock feed.
“This often leads to decreased animal performance,” says Laura Eastwood, a research assistant at the Prairie Swine Centre Inc. near Saskatoon.
DON causes reduced feed intake, reduced weight gain and vomiting when fed to hogs. It can also inhibit protein synthesis, cause gastroenteritis and gastrointestinal tract lesions and affect the immune system.
“Despite the problems associated with feeding DON-contaminated grains to swine, there have been very few strategies aimed at mitigating the negative impact,” said Eastwood.
“Currently, the best option is to replace contaminated grain with clean grain in whole or in part. However, in years when mycotoxins are particularly bad, this may not be viable for many producers.”
Eastwood thinks she might have the answer.
“Recently, we conducted a research trial using 200 nursery pigs to determine if including SDAP in DON contaminated nursery diets could mitigate the negative impacts observed,” she said.
“Pigs were assigned to their experimental diets three days post-weaning: weaned at 26 plus or minus two days of age. They were fed a negative control (NC) diet, which contained only a clean source of wheat, a positive control (PC) diet in which about half the wheat source used was contaminated with DON and the PC diet plus eight percent SDAP.”
The SDAP was a direct replacement for fishmeal in the other diets, and all other ingredients were similar.
Eastwood and her team measured the body weights and feed intakes of the pigs on days zero, three, 11 and 20 of the trial, and also collected intestinal samples to analyze gut morphology, such as mucosal thickness, villus height and crypt depth.
No animals showed signs of vomiting or diarrhea, but there were large performance differences in animals fed the different diets.
She said the average daily gain (ADG) of pigs fed the DON-contaminated diet was significantly lower than those fed the non-contaminated grain.
“Although this was more pronounced in the initial three days of the trial, it continued through to Day 20,” she said.
ADG returned to the same level as that seen in pigs that weren’t fed DON when SDAP was included in the contaminated diet.
The same pattern occurred for average daily feed intake.
Eastwood concluded that pigs fed a DON-contaminated diet containing SDAP performed the same or slightly better than pigs that were fed non-contaminated feed.
The trial found that adding eight percent SDAP into nursery diets can mitigate the negative impacts of DON.
“In general, feeding grains contaminated with DON should be avoided,” Eastwood said.
“But this may not always be possible during years where contamination is high. If contaminated grains are suspected, inclusion of SDAP into the diets is beneficial, and performance can be maintained.”
The Prairie Swine Centre hopes to follow up this study by looking at SDAP inclusion levels and feeding duration.
“The current study was a preliminary study designed to test the hypothesis that SDAP could help mitigate negative effects, but since SDAP is expensive, we now want to see if there are similar effects with lower inclusion,” she said.
