267 Effects of replacing soybean meal with a hydrothermal mechanical processed soybean meal on growth performance and health of nursery pigs fed a low complexity diet

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that replacing soybean meal (SBM) with a hydrothermal mechanical processed (HTM) SBM (Provisoy), optimized for digestibility, would improve growth performance of nursery pigs. In total, 1,680 weaned pigs [5.4 ± 0.2 kg initial body weight (BW)] were allotted to 16 replicate pens per treatment (21 pigs per pen) in 2 barns. Pens were blocked by location within barn and randomly allotted to 5 treatments with 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20% HTM SBM. A low complexity diet with 31% conventional SBM and limited inclusion of highly digestible protein ingredients and health promoting additives was used as the basal diet for the 0% HTM SBM treatment, and HTM SBM was added at the expense of conventional SBM at levels of 5, 10, 15, and 20% in phase 1 (d 0-10) and phase 2 (d 10-22), respectively. Pig and feed weights were recorded at the beginning and end of each phase. Data were analyzed using the lme4 package of R 4.1.2, and the statistical model included the fixed effect of treatment, as well as the random effects of barn and location within barn. Mortality and removals were analyzed as generalized linear mixed models, with a binomial distribution. Contrasts were used to evaluate the linear and quadratic effect of increased dietary inclusion of HTM SBM. Results indicated that increasing HTM SBM linearly improved (P < 0.01) gain to feed ratio (G:F) in phase 1 and tended (P < 0.10) to linearly improve average daily gain (ADG) and G:F d 0 to 22 post-weaning (Table 1). Mortality and removals were numerically reduced when HTM SBM was added to the diet. In conclusion, replacing SBM with HTM SBM up to 20% in a low complexity diet improved early nursery performance and numerically reduced mortality and removals.