Dr. Lee-Anne Huber’s goal for her swine research program at the University of Guelph is simple: to answer nutrition-related questions and real-world challenges producers are facing. As an associate professor in swine nutrition, she sees her position as a service role to the pork industry – and her research focus has evolved to concentrate on sow nutrition.
“In the broadest sense, I help producers maximize efficiency and improve margin over feed cost. Sow nutrition is an area where research is vastly outdated, especially considering the genetic progress of the last 20 years, so we can have a large positive impact,” she explains.
As someone who was raised on a mixed beef and pig farm, she understands the value of working closely with the industry. Many of her research ideas come directly from producers and nutritionists, with whom she meets regularly – often very informally over a coffee – to talk about challenges in the barn and how her research can help. At the same time, when she has ideas of her own, she floats them past her industry contacts to gauge relevance.
Huber currently has four active research streams, all with projects underway at the new Ontario Swine Research Centre in Elora*.
Lactating sows
It was a conversation with an industry nutritionist that was the catalyst for Huber’s research into developing nutrition recommendations for lactating sows. Entering the last year of the four-year project, the team is applying precision feeding technology and exploring feed blending to precisely meet sow nutrition requirements during the transition period as well as each day of lactation.
“Recommendations for lactating sows have been mostly anecdotal with no research to put some data behind those ideas,” she says. “We’re seeing some really interesting results, and we are now applying those results to see if the feeding strategy has a positive effect on sows.”
Amino acids
Since starting her position at Guelph, Huber has also been working on updating feeding recommendations for reproductive sows with a focus on amino acids. The last studies on the subject were done in the 1960s, she notes, and with so much genetic improvement since then, the information is no longer relevant.
“We’ve done some mathematical equations to scale up requirements from the 1960s to today, but we aren’t sure if the metabolism or physiology of the sow is still the same, so I’ve been working on that for quite a while,” she says.
Maximizing mammary development using nutrition
Huber is also building on research by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research scientist Dr. Chantal Farmer, which found that increasing lysine in late gestation by 40% increased mammary development in sows by a corresponding 40%. Her follow up work is looking at whether increasing lysine at lower levels – 20% or 30% for example – would result in similar improvements.
“We need to give nutritionists solid recommendations they can use on the farm, so I’m following up to see if we can refine the recommendation,” Huber explains. “Also, in the previous study, we didn’t follow the gilts into lactation, so we are following up now to see if they actually produce more milk as well.”
Farmer’s original research used soybean meal as a lysine source, so Huber has added a side project to investigate whether it is the lysine itself or something about the soybean meal that caused the improvement in mammary development.
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