Nutrition: Irradiation of feed ingredients – a new frontier in nursery diets?

Experiments have shown that irradiation improves nursery pig growth and efficiency of gain compared with pigs fed traditional spray-dried animal plasma and meal diets

by JANICE MURPHY

Modern nursery diets commonly include expensive specialty protein sources, such as spray-dried animal plasma, dried whey and fish meal, to encourage young pigs to eat after weaning. These starter pig diets are typically fed in a pelleted form to overcome problems with flowability of the feed.