Feeding changes open opportunities

Sep 28, 2023

There’s a strong relationship between health and growth in a calf’s early life and that animal’s lifetime production. That means what happens to a calf in its first few hours and days is extremely critical, particularly concerning what it’s fed.

What, how much and when to feed calves is changing and opens new opportunities for producers to impact the long-term health, growth and productivity of their animals, said Michael Steele, a professor in the University of Guelph-Department of Animal Biosciences.

“You can mold the calf when it’s born,” he said. “We call this developmental plasticity, which is strong early in life and goes down as time goes on.”

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Video: What Happens When Pigs Adapt to High Soybean Meal Diets? - Gustavo Lima

In this special rerun episode of The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, Gustavo Lima, PhD candidate in Animal Science at Iowa State University, discusses how grow-finish pigs respond to high soybean meal diets. He explains the initial drop in feed intake, changes in backfat, later adaptation, energy efficiency, amino acid utilization, and the rise in nitrogen excretion at higher inclusion levels. Listen now on all major platforms!

Click here to read the full research article: https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/...

“Once they got adapted to the diet, they can handle higher levels of inclusion of soybean meal.”

Meet the guest: Gustavo Lima / gustavo-lima-a9867127 is a PhD candidate in Animal Science at Iowa State University whose work focuses on swine nutrition, ingredient characterization, energy metabolism, caloric efficiency, and applied data analysis. With more than 15 years of experience in swine production across Latin America, Gustavo also brings expertise in environmental control, performance evaluation, barn ventilation, and grow-finish housing. Learn more from Gustavo Lima on The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, available on all major platforms.