Basic Concepts and Potential Impact of Precision Feeding Technologies in the Production of Growing-Finishing Pigs

Nutrient requirements can be defined as the amount of nutrients that allows a given animal at a given time to perform its natural functions in a normal manner, that is, to express its production potential. However, farm animals are raised in groups within which animals can greatly differ in body weight, growth potential, etc., and consequently, in the required amount of nutrients. In the context of rearing animals in groups with a unique feed, the requirement for a given nutrient is rather defined as the level of supply which results in a given (desired) level of production (e.g., maximal growth). For most nutrients, however, underfed animals exhibit reduced performance while the overfed ones exhibit near optimal performance. The desired level of production is therefore obtained with levels of nutrients that satisfy the requirements of the most demanding pigs, with the result that most of the pigs receive more nutrients than needed. Providing growing animals with excess nutrients to avoid reducing herd performance has become a common practice in commercial swine operations, hence contributing to increasing feed costs and nutrient inefficiency. Precision feeding is proposed to alleviate the limitations of actual group-feeding systems. Precision feeding allows feeding individual pigs with diets tailored daily to their estimated nutrient requirements by using daily feed intake and body weight measurements. It has been demonstrated that feeding pigs with diets tailored daily to each pig lysine requirements allows obtaining similar intake and growth performance than conventional feeding systems. Precision feeding reduces lysine intake by more than 25% and feeding costs by more than 8%. It is an effective approach to improve nutrient utilization efficiency, and to reduce nutrient excretion and feed costs. The real-time individual pig nutrient requirement estimated using each pig pattern of feed intake and growth represents a fundamental paradigm shift in pigs nutrition because pig nutrient requirements are no longer a fixed population attribute, but a dynamic process that evolves independently for each animal while regulated by its own intrinsic (e.g., genetics) and extrinsic (e.g., environmental and social stressors) modulating factors.