Effect of microencapsulated organic acids on growth performance, nutrient digestibility, blood profile, fecal gas emission, fecal microbial, and meat-carcass grade quality of growing-finishing pigs

Abstract

The present study was conducted to assess the effect of a microencapsulated mixture of organic acids (MOAs) supplementation on the growth performance, nutrient digestibility, blood profile, fecal gas emission, fecal microbial, and meat-carcass grade quality in growing-finishing pigs. A total of 90 crossbred pigs (Duroc × Landrace × Yorkshire) with mean initial body weight (BW) of 22.68 ± 0.01 kg were used in a 16-week experiment. Pigs were randomly distributed to one of 3 treatment and 6 replicate pens per treatment 5 pigs per pen. The dietary treatments were as follows: control, basal diet; MOAs1, basal diet + 0.05% MOAs; and MOAs2, basal diet + 0.10% MOAs, respectively).The supplementation of MOAs in the basal diet has significant (P< 0.05) linearly improvement in body weight gain (BWG) at week 8, 12, and 16 and average daily gain (ADG) at weeks 4, 8, 12 and the overall experiment. In addition, MOAs supplementation had linearly (P< 0.05) decreased fecal Escherichia coli (E. coli) counts in pigs at week 16. The inclusion of MOAs in pigs’ diet had linearly (P< 0.05) increased in backfat thickness (BFT) and lean meat percentage (LMT) at week 4. The drip loss decreased linearly (P < 0.05) on day 7 supplemented with a graded level of MOAs. Dietary supplementation of MOAs failed to show significant effects on nutrient digestibility, blood profile and fecal gas emission. Thus, MOAs supplementation had positively enhanced the growth performance, fecal microbial, and meat quality of growing-finishing pigs.