Swine Nutrition Blackbelt #12 - Dr. Julia Holen: Can essential fatty acid supplementation during lactation increase piglet average daily gain?

During lactation the sow prioritizes her litter and will mobilize nutrients from her own body to adequately provide nutrients to her litter if she doesn't receive the proper amount of nutrients in her diet. That is why it is critical for nutritionists to formulate a diet to minimize weight loss in the sow while maximizing weight gain in the litter. In this episode, I talk with Dr. Julia Holen about her work at KSU where she studied the effects of feeding elevated levels of essential fatty acids to sows and how that affected reproductive and litter performance. Tune into this short 9-minute podcast to hear the results!

Meet the guest: Dr. Julia Holen is a recent Ph.D. graduate from Kansas State University. Before KSU, she received both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Minnesota. During her time at the University of Minnesota, her research focused on the impacts of dietary zinc in late gestation sow diets on pre-weaning mortality and the digestibility of supplemental zinc sources in sow gestation and lactation diets. However, for her Ph.D. at KSU, her research focused on the effects of essential fatty acids on piglet survival and sow reproductive performance and the influence of branched-chain amino acids on lactating sow performance, which she shares with us in this episode. After graduating, Julia recently began working with Swine Vet Center in Saint Peter, Minnesota.