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The effect of design of mono-place feeders on growth performance of finishing pigs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2017

N. Walker*
Affiliation:
Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland Hillsborough, Co Down, BT26 6DR
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Extract

When feed is offered ad libitum from hopper feeders, with water supply remote from the feeder, the feed conversion ratio with pelleted diets is improved by around 10% compared with non-pelleted diets (Patterson and Walker, 1989). This difference was reduced to around 6% when mono-place feeders with built-in water supply were used (Walker, 1990). The improved digestibility due to pelleting accounts for only 1% unit of these differences and the majority therefore appears to be due to feed wastage. A hopper feeder was developed by Baxter (1989) which minimised feed wastage of both pelleted and non-pelleted diets when assessed by short term collections of spilled feed. It was considered that a longer term growth trial would be a good indicator of the benefits of this feeder compared with other designs which had been used here in previous experiments.

Type
Animal welfare
Copyright
Copyright © The British Society of Animal Production 1991

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References

Baxter, M.R. 1989. Design of a new feeder for pigs. Farm Buildings Progress, 96: 1922.Google Scholar
Patterson, D.C. and Walker, N. 1989. Observations of voluntary feed intake and wastage from various types of self feed hopper. In: Forbes, J.M., Varley, M.A. and Lawrence, T.L.J. (Editors) The voluntary food intake of pigs. British Society for Animal Production Occasional Publication No. 13, pp. 114116.Google Scholar
Walker, N. 1990. Some observations on single-space hopper feeders for finishing pigs. Pig Unit Newsletter No. 34, pp. 48, National Agricultural Centre, Stoneleigh.Google Scholar
Walker, N. 1990. A comparison of single- and multi-space feeders for growing pigs fed non-pelleted diets ad libitum. Animal Feed Science and Technology, 30: 169173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar