Nutritional management during gestation significantly affects sow welfare, reproductive performance, and the health of offspring throughout the production cycle.
Gestation nutrition management is both a welfare and a production issue: sows in poor body condition suffer physically from the demands of pregnancy and lactation on an inadequate nutritional foundation, while oversupplied sows face farrowing complications that cause direct welfare harm. The tension between restricting social feeding in group housing and meeting individual nutritional needs has driven the development of electronic feeding systems that allow precise individual ration delivery. Fiber supplementation of gestation diets addresses hunger motivation in feed-restricted sows by increasing gut fill without adding excessive calories — this directly reduces the welfare harm of chronic hunger that restricted feeding causes. Good gestation nutrition is foundational to sow welfare throughout the production cycle.