Dr. Denise Beaulieu-Prairie Swine Centre:
It's being removed from the sow where all it's had at that point in time is milk so it has to adapt to dry feed, it has to adapt to plant proteins, it has to adapt to a new environment without the sow so all of these can cause a lot of reactions in the young pig.
It's a very very stressful few days post weaning and we have to formulate diets that are very palatable so we have some animal products in there, for example some milk byproducts.
The newly weaned pig has only seen proteins from milk so we have to make that transition a little bit slow so we will adapt the pig to plant proteins over a period of a few days.
Because new proteins, if the cells in the gut have not seen these before, they can cause an allergenic reaction so we have to adapt it slowly.
The other issue, if the pig has not tasted these before, it may not want something that's novel or new so we have to adapt the piglet to these slowly over time.
Scientists are evaluating hundreds of different combinations of feed ingredients and treatments.
Dr. Beaulieu expects to know, by Christmas, which ones will be used in feeding experiments due to begin next year.
Source: Farmscape