Sorting growing-finishing pigs by weight fails to improve growth performance or weight variation

A trial was conducted to determine the effects of sorting pigs by body weight at placement on growth performance and weight variation at finishing. Unsorted pigs and heavy sorted pigs had higher ADG than medium or light sorted pigs. By the end of the trial, final body weights ranked in the following descending order: heavy sorted, unsorted, medium sorted, and light sorted. Final weights of unsorted pigs were heavier than the average final weight of all sorted pigs. Additionally, differences in body weight variation were not detectable by the end of the study. These data suggest that sorting pigs uniformly by weight to pens has little effect on final variability in individual body weights and placing pigs into pens regardless of weight may increase the amount of pork produced from a system and reduce turnaround time in barns

Effects of creatine monohydrate on finishing pig growth performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality

Growth performance, carcass characteristics, and meat quality were evaluated from 320 pigs fed either a control diet or diets containing added creatine monohydrate (CMH). Dietary treatments, initiated 30-d prior to slaughter (192 lb BW), consisted of: 1) a control diet; 2) control diet with 3 g CMH/pig/d for 30 d (maintenance); 3) 25 g CMH/pig/d for 5 d followed by 3 g CMH/pig/d for the next 25 d (early load); 4) or 25 g CMH/pig/d 5 d before slaughter (late load). The results from this experiment suggest that added CMH does not affect finishing pig growth performance but may increase longissimus muscle firmness and decrease drip loss at 14 d postmortem