Effects of feeding a proprietary yeast blend on growth performance of commercial nursery pigs

Abstract Text: Two experiments were conducted to evaluate feeding Evosure^TM (NUTRIQUEST, Mason City, IA), a novel yeast additive, on growth performance of commercial nursery pigs. In both experiments, weanling pigs were fed a common starter diet without yeast for 7 d. On d 7, pens within block were assigned randomly to experimental diets in a randomized complete block design resulting in 16 replicates per treatment. In Exp 1, nursery pigs (n = 1,728; BW = 5.78±0.21 kg) were assigned to one of 4 dietary treatments, which included diets containing 1) no yeast (CON); 2) 1.0 g/kg Evosure^TM (EVO); 3) 0.5 g/kg yeast product 1 (Y1); and 4) 2.0 g/kg yeast product 2 (Y2). This experiment was conducted over a 16-d period. Compared to pigs fed CON, pigs fed EVO tended to have 5.6% higher ADG (0.29 vs. 0.28 kg/d, P = 0.10), 2.5% higher G:F (0.85 vs. 0.83, P = 0.06) and 2.4% greater ending BW (10.12 vs. 9.88 kg, P = 0.10). However, feeding Y1 or Y2 diets did not affect pig growth performance. In Exp 2, nursery pigs (n = 1,296; BW = 5.48±0.40 kg) were assigned to one of 3 dietary treatments including diets containing no yeast (CON), 1.0 g/kg Evosure^TM (EVO), or 0.4 g/kg yeast product 3 (Y3). This experiment was conducted over a 42-d period with three diet phases. In Phase 1, feeding EVO resulted in 7.7% greater ADG (0.26 vs. 0.24 kg/d, P = 0.05) and 5.7% greater G:F (0.88 vs. 0.83, P = 0.03) compared with feeding CON. In Phase 2, pigs fed EVO showed 5.2% greater ADG relative to those fed CON (0.42 vs. 0.40, P = 0.02) and Y3 (0.42 vs. 0.40, P = 0.02). The BW at the end of Phase 2 was greater in pigs fed EVO than those fed CON (10.31 vs. 10.06 kg, P = 0.03) and Y3 (10.31 vs. 10.11 kg, P = 0.05). Pig ADG was not affected by dietary treatments in Phase 3, but feeding EVO resulted in lower ADFI (P < 0.05) and higher G:F (P < 0.03) compared with feeding CON and Y3. Feeding Y3 did not affect pig growth performance in this experiment. Results from these two experiments suggest that feeding Evosure^TM to nursery pigs improves their growth performance relative to negative control and three other yeast products.

Keywords: growth performance, nursery pigs, yeast