214 Impact of a nutritional water supplement on nursery mortality as determined by different statistical methods and consequences for on-farm application of technology

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this experiment was to determine the effect of supplementation with Furst Strike Direct (FSD; a source of monoglycerides, natural flavors, and antioxidants, Furst-McNess Company) via drinking water for the first week post-weaning in large-scale commercial settings to allow stakeholder decisions to be made for implementation. A total of 88,667 pigs and 53 replicate barns from two different large-scale production systems: System 1) 37,003 pigs across 28 barns, and System 2) 51,664 pigs across 25 barns were allocated to either control water program, or the addition of FSD at 3.2 oz per gallon of stock solution, metered at 1:128 into drinking water. Each system had multiple sow farm flows. The average time of application post-weaning was 8 and 10 d, in System 1 and 2, respectively. Mortality data were collected via record-keeping systems for the 6th week post-weaning. The Grubb’s test was used to check data for outliers with P < 0.05 as the level of significance for eliminating any outliers. Each individual system was analyzed for the effect of supplementation, and then the two systems were combined into one data set for a combined analysis with greater replication. GLM procedure in Minitab with Fisher’s t-test determining differences between treatments was used for the analysis. Mortality of System 1 (1.52% vs. 0.95%; SEM = 0.28, P = 0.170), and System 2 (2.72% vs. 1.91%; SEM = 0.38, P = 0.109) were numerically improved by supplementation. Table 1 are the data analyses for both systems combined. At this greater level of replication, we can see a trend for the impact of supplementation on mortality (-31%, P < 0.10), and when incorporating sow farm into the model supplementation was statistically significant (-33%, P < 0.05). The determination of the efficacy of any technology in situ is very difficult with the amount of variation that is present in commercial environments. However, key stakeholders (e.g., farmer, veterinarian, nutritionist) depend on the evaluation of live production data to make management decisions, and the work presented provides an indication of the level of replication needed to be able to detect relatively small, but financially important changes in performance on nursery mortality.