A Notice on Vitamin Withdrawal for the Immune Response and Performance in Fattening Pigs

Abstract

An easy option for decreasing the cost of commercial swine production is to alter the pig feed. An experiment was carried out to test the effect of reducing vitamins in the diet of fattening pigs before marketing. This was began by dividing 40 swine, averaging 60 kg, into 2 pens consisting of 20 sows and 20 hogs. These groups were fed 59 days or average live weight of 100 kg with 4 diets : a control diet (T1); a diet from which 50% of the vitamins had been withdrawn from day 20-59 of the experiment (T2); a diet from which all vitamins had been withdrawn from day 27-59 of the experiment (T3); and a diet from which all vitamins had been withdrawn from day 33 of the experiment (T4), T1 and T2, T1 and T3, and T1 and T4 were compared regarding immune response to Sheep Red Blood Cells (SRBC). T2, T3, and T4 were stimulated after feeding their respective diets for day 13, 6 and at start respectively. Blood samples were collected after the first 7 days of stimulation. Then collected a 2^nd and 3^rd time after 10 and 20 days of stimulation. The results showed that all antibody titer response to SRBC were similar, except that T2 tended to be higher than T1 the 1^st and 2^nd time :45.00, 18.00 and 29.50, 23.00 respectively. T3 and T4 tended to be high all 3 times, except that T3 and T4 were lower than the control : T1 was 18.00, 23.00 and 44.00; T2 was 45.00, 29.50 and 38.50; T3 was 14.85, 21.14 and 34.28; T4 was 18.28, 10.57 and 24.57 respectively. The average daily gain (ADG) of fattening pigs from 60 kg-market weight in T1, T2, T3 and T4 : 0.575, 0.564, 0.513 and 0.564 kg/ day respectively was similar except that T3 was slightly lower. The results showed the feed conversion rate in T1, T2, T3 and T4 was also similar: 3.812, 3.898, 4.289 and 3.908 respectively, except that T3 tend to be higher than the other groups.