Feeding Sows Lucerne, or Diets with Similar Energy and Nutritional Profiles to Lucerne, Improves the Pre-Weaning Performance of Piglets

Feeding fibre and branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) to sows during late gestation and lactation, respectively, have been shown to improve litter weights at weaning. Therefore, supplementing primiparous sow diets with lucerne chaff, a feedstuff high in fibre, BCAA and tryptophan, may improve the performance of their progeny. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of feeding primiparous sows ( n = 118) either (i) a control diet (CON); (ii) CON with 1 kg of lucerne chaff (LUC); or (iii) a diet formulated to have a similar digestible energy and BCAA content as CON + LUC (SIMLUC 1) until farrowing. The LUC and SIMLUC 1 diets improved day 21 litter weight ( p = 0.055). In Experiment 2 primiparous ( n = 111) and multiparous sows (parities 2–5, n = 112) were fed either the CON or SIMLUC diet (SIMLUC 2) from day 110 of gestation to farrowing (PreF), or to day 10 post-farrowing (PreF + PostF). The SIMLUC 2 diet tended to be more beneficial to primiparous compared to multiparous sows when fed PreF, as indicated by an interaction between diet and parity on day 21 average piglet weights ( p = 0.078). Overall, SIMLUC is most effective in improving primiparous progeny performance as evidenced by their D21 weights.