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Minerals and Vitamins

With minerals, most of your minerals are going to be present in the grain and soybean ration you provide, more or less near your requirements of the pig. However, there is going to be some you’re going to have to supplement. The minerals that are most likely to be deficient in the corn-soybean meal diet will be calcium, phosphorus, sodium, chloride. And then your microminerals iron, zinc, iodine and selenium. Just to refresh your memory, macrominerals are really kind of important biologically for structure. Your microminerals are going to be more important for energy metabolism. So these guys are actually going to feed into gain.

If you looking at the macrominerals, calcium and phosphorus, by far, are required in the greatest amounts. This is important because you need a strong skeletal structure in any animal. This is especially true in swine. They are grown mostly in confinement which means they are reared on concrete. They are going to be more prone to having leg problems, they are going to be prone to coming up lame and more prone to actually having skeletal fractures. That’s not good. A refresher from 311, calcium and phosphorus has to be maintained in a proper balance in the diet. And this is really because if you have too much of calcium, you are going to end up having a phosphorus deficiency. Because you have more calcium it is going to decrease the efficiency of phosphorus absorption. And the converse works too. Too much phosphorus, you will affect calcium absorption.

The proper ratio is right here (Ca:P ration = 1:1 to 1.25:1). That’s just kind of a fact to know. One important thing about phosphorus and swine, and this is actually a big problem, 60 to 80% of the phosphorus that you are going to have in your feedstuffs is actually unavailable to the pig. This is because it chemically binds up into a molecule called phytate. And the pig does not have the enzyme capable of breaking it down so it goes right through the pig.

This basically just is meant to show you that the phosphorus availability and common feedstuffs that we are going to feed really are variable.

Corn, about 12% of the phosphorus in the ration is actually going to be able to be used by the pig. Soybean meal is not a lot better. A good source would be animal protein.

So just to run down the rest of the minerals. Salt. You are going to need it in the diet at a maximum of about .5%. Salt is important because if you have a salt deficiency in the ration, the pigs are going to have a decrease in feed intake that basically is going to cause their growth rate to decrease. And that is the last thing you want to do because that is where your money comes from. An interesting thing with salt, you can have an awful lot of it in the ration, up to 7%, as long as they have enough water. Potassium, magnesium and sulfur they are usually just fine as they are. You don’t need to supplement them. Zinc and your other microminerals can start to become problems. Zinc, what happens is your animals will start to get scaly skin that will be a symptom. But, they are going to have a reduced growth and they’ll have other production problems, too. With iron, this is really an important one only in young pigs. What happens is an iron deficiency leads to anemia. Iron is important for hemoglobin. And hemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen. It is probably pretty obvious why that would cause problems if you had anemia. The reason it’s a problem in baby pigs is because they grow so much in the first couple of weeks of their life; they almost quadruple their body weight. Milk, which is their only real source of nutrients for the first couple of weeks, is really iron-deficient. You can fix that problem pretty easily. Just give them an iron shot within the first couple of days of their life and you do not have a problem. Once they are weaned onto a grain-based diet, they can get all the iron they need from the ration. Iodine, really not a problem. You’re supplementing with salt anyway, just supplement with iodized salt. Selenium may or may not be a problem, just depends on what region of the country you’re in. You guys are all familiar with the selenium problem in Eastern Oregon. The Great Lakes has a similar problem. Just remember, the FDA actually regulates the amount that you can supplement. And then chromium. This is kind of a wild card. It’s really not a deficiency problem. But there’s been some growth studies that show if you supplement chromium picalate, you’ll actually increase muscle and you’ll actually decrease fat composition in the pigs. This is kind of controversial though. I would say probably out of every ten studies that’s tried this, it has worked about six times. It is not a widely spread practice in the swine industry.

Just some sources of our most important minerals. Calcium and phosphorus. Pretty much the usual players. Mono- and di-calcium phosphate, defluorinated rock phosphate, steamed bone meal. Calcium you can also get from limestone.

Probably the most important thing you need to know for swine rations on this slide, your trace minerals are basically going to be provided by a premix. You are going to buy a commercially available premix and then you are going to add it in.

This slide, obviously, I do not want you guys to memorize, you probably cannot see it too well in the back.

It is basically just a list of the common minerals that could be problems in the diet, the form that they are most often used, basically the source and then their bioavailability. I wanted to put that in there just for your future reference because that it is a really good summary you might find useful later on. So that basically wraps up minerals.

Now, we go to vitamins. Remember, there are two classes of vitamins. There are water-soluble vitamins and there are fat-soluble vitamins. You can get a lot of your vitamins just from the feed, just like the minerals. Also, some of the B-vitamins can be made by bacteria in the gut and they can get absorbed in the large intestine. But, just like minerals, you are going to have to supplement some of your vitamins. The vitamins most likely to be deficient in a grain-soybean meal diet are basically listed here (A, D, Riboflavin, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, and B₁₂).

Just like the minerals, vitamins are going to be supplemented with use of a commercial premix. One trend you ought to be aware of that the industry, typically, will supplement at levels two to three times what the NRC says is a minimum requirement. And the idea is this is cheap insurance. Vitamins are actually pretty cheap relatively speaking to other things you can add in there. The idea is the NRC requirements are made really from experiments that are done in universities. Your farm may be a dramatically different situation than where the requirements were determined. So, if one is good, two will be better.

Just a few comments on premixes. They do have shelf lives. And that is primarily because some of the fat-soluble vitamins can really be oxidized pretty easily. And once they are oxidized, they don’t have activity any more. Store them in cool, dry places. And only store them for a short period of time. Vitamin premixes are good for about three months on your shelf. Also, another note, sometimes you can get a commercially made premix that contains both your vitamins and your minerals. If you do that you just got to remember the minerals in there can actually cause the activity on your vitamins to decrease a lot quicker than they would if you bought your premixes separately.

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