By Gary Hartley

Using rice as alternative feed works for pigs and could tackle supply backlogs

Rice may have the potential to be used as an effective energy feed for livestock, while tackling oversupply issues, according to research in China.

China currently has a substantial backlog of long grained indica rice. This is due to its high yields and fast speed of growth but lower cooking and eating quality than japonica rice, which results in lower demand.

Farmers in parts of rural China already feed rice to pigs and chickens, but scientists at Hunan Normal University set out to discover whether this approach could be more widely used.

Links to improved digestion

With rice a high-fibre feed and pig digestion varying at different points in their development, the team worked with animals at three different growth stages. They fed rice at different inclusion rates to pigs in the growing-finishing period, as part of a protein-restricted diet — a type of diet commonly used to increase the fat content of animals, for tenderness and flavour of meat.

They found that rates of up to 15% didn’t affect performance for growing pigs, and higher rates (up to 20% and 30%) could be included without effects on performance for early-finishing and late-finishing pigs, respectively.

For late-finishing pigs, they observed that a 25% inclusion rate of rice resulted in significant improvements in performance compared to pigs fed corn control diets. This could be due to the small granule size of rice starch compared to corn being easier to digest, the scientists wrote in the journal Animals.

The rise of rice?

The findings suggest that rice may be a suitable partial replacement for corn in pig diets, providing empirical evidence to back up existing rice-feeding practices. As well as providing a suitable use for indica rice backlogs, such a move could also help farmers guard against fluctuations in corn prices, assuming the price of rice remains stable.

However, the researchers cautioned that the mechanisms behind the successful experimental inclusion of rice as an energy feedstuff need to be further explored, as well as the effects of the diet on meat quality.

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