In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the feeding of high fibre diets to pigs. The potential use of these diets will depend upon the extent to which the fibrous components are fermented and the subsequent capacity of the products of fermentation, that is volatile fatty acids, to meet the energy needs of the animals. One fibrous feed that has considerable potential for inclusion in diets of pigs is sugar beet pulp and the present experiments were designed to study the extent to which diets containing varying proportions of plain sugar beet pulp influenced nutrient partition and the efficiency of energy utilisation of growing pigs.

The experiment was designed as a 4 x 2 factorial arrangement and involved 4 diets containing 0, 150, 300 and 450 g plain sugar beet pulp/kg, each fed to pigs between 20 and 90 kg bodyweight at 2 levels so that the animals received either 1.5 or 3.0 times their maintenance energy requirement (M), where M = 440 kJ ME/kg bodywelght 0.75 per day. The diets were formulated to be iso-energetic (13.8 MJ DE/kg) and iso-lysinic (9.5 g/kg) and were based on barley, wheat, soyabean and fishmeal with plain sugar beet pulp largely replacing cereals at the appropriate rates.