A comparison of offering meal and pellets to finishing pigs from self-feed hoppers with and without built-in watering

Abstract

In an experiment of 3 × 2 factorial design, a total of 660 pigs with mean initial and final liveweights of 36.4 kg and 87.9 kg respectively and penned in groups of 10 were used to compare meal (M) and pellets (P) within three self-feed hopper systems. The feed hoppers comprised a conventional dry hopper (CD), a standard wet hopper (LW) and a wet hopper with a short trough (SW). The wet hoppers had nipple drinkers within the trough and feeding was ad libitum. The effects of feed hopper on the rate of dry matter (DM) intake, liveweight gain and DM intake Miveweight gain were small and statistically non-significant. The killing-out yield with CDM was higher than with all other treatments and produced a hopperx form of diet interaction; the killing-out yields were CDM 772, UWM 773, SWM 769, CDP 783, LWP 774 and SWP 766 (SE of mean 2.6 g kg −1). With meal, the type of hopper had no significant effect on DM intake: carcass gain, while with pellets both wet hopper systems gave significantly poorer values than the conventional hopper (interaction P < 0.05). The ratio, DM intake: carcass gains, was CDM 3.32, LWM 3.28, SWM 3.30, CDP 2.93, LWP 3.08 and SWP 3.09 (SE of mean 0.041). The difference between dry meal and dry pellets for DM intake: carcass gain was 12.1% in favour of pellets.