It is increasingly being realized that hindgut fermentation in monogastric animals has an important role in maintaining the health of the GIT and also of the animal itself. Thirty-five feedstuffs which were likely to be rich in fermentable carbohydrates were fermented in vitro using faeces from 28 day old piglets as the inoculum. The piglets had been offered a standard creep feed (no added antibiotics and copper). The in vitrocumulative gas production technique (Theodorou et al., 1994) was used to measure the fermentation characteristics of the feedstuffs.

The substrates were separated into groups according to the component present in the largest amounts as: fibre (pea hulls, oatbran, soya hulls, wheat bran, wheat straw); grain (barley, maize oats, wheat); gums (gum arabic, guar gum); oligosaccharides (fructo-, trans-galacto-oligosaccharide); pectin (low and high methylated citrus fruits, high methylated sugar beet pectin); starch (oatmeal, inulin from Jerusalem Artichokes and Chicory Root, maize starch, native & treated potato starch, wheat flour, pea starch). The cumulative gas data were fitted to the monophasic modified Michaelis-Menten model (Groot et al, 1996).