Effects of irradiation of spray-dried blood meal and animal plasma on nursery pig growth performance

Kansas State University Swine Research. Two trials were conducted to determine the effects of irradiation of spray-dried blood meal and animal plasma on nursery pig growth performance. In Exp. 1, irradiation of spray-dried blood meal resulted in improved ADG and F/G and tended to increase ADFI for the 14 d experiment. The majority of the increase in growth performance occurred during the first week of the trial. In Exp. 2, ADG and ADFI were increased from d 0 to 10 for pigs fed irradiated spray-dried animal plasma compared to pigs fed regular spray-dried animal plasma. In addition, we observed differences in growth performance between different sources of spray-dried plasma used in this experiment.