Welcome to EvaPig®

Introduction

EvaPig® is a calculator of energy, amino acid and phosphorus values of ingredients and diets for growing and adult pigs. EvaPig® Edition 2020 includes a database of chemical composition and nutritive values for more than 250 reference ingredients. The composition data are derived from the INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ Tables of chemical composition and nutritive values (available on the website https://www.feedtables.com, AFZ, 2017-2021) while the nutritional data were obtained using expertise from INRAE and equations derived from in vivo measurements published in the scientific literature. This new edition of EvaPig® includes twice more ingredients than the first edition, released in 2008, as well as new information such as electrolyte balance values of ingredients and diets.

Users can create their own ingredients, either by copying and modifying the reference ingredients, or by creating new ingredients using only chemical composition data. EvaPig® uses equations and coefficients that calculate the nutritive values of the new ingredients.

EvaPig® can create and compare diets created from the reference or user-defined ingredients. It calculates the chemical and nutritional values of the diet by using those of the diet ingredients, with possible corrections for the physical form of the diet and phytase supplementation. EvaPig® can calculate the energy values of a diet from its chemical composition only. EvaPig® also provides graphical representations that allow to visualize and compare diet composition and energy values.

Figure 1. EvaPig® main menu

Why use EvaPig®?

Pig production faces numerous challenges.

Feeding accounts for more than half of the cost of pig production and heavily impacts upon the technical and economic results of the pig unit. As feed prices change very quickly, optimising diet composition becomes important. Because energy is the main component of the feed cost, it is highly beneficial to use an energy system that matches animal requirements as closely as possible to minimise the feed cost.

Likewise, the utilization of amino acid and phosphorus values close to animal requirements results in a more efficient use of these nutrients by the animals, lower feed costs and less excretion of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment.

Another challenge to pig feeding is the large number of available ingredients. Reference documents like the INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ Tables provide values for the most common ingredients. However, the values are given for representative ingredients: the nutritional value of actual ingredients may differ significantly due to variation in chemical composition. Tables often include “correction” equations but using them to predict complex nutritional values is not straightforward. For new ingredients that have recently appeared on the feed market, tables offer little or no way to calculate their nutritional values.
Finally, animals, husbandry conditions and production targets are variable with subsequent variable nutritional requirements and quantities of feed.
EvaPig® provides several answers to these challenges.

It offers net energy values, ileal standardised amino acid digestibilities and phosphorus digestibilities for ingredients and diets. These are currently the most advanced nutritional systems for pigs. Nutritional values based on former concepts (digestible energy, digestible protein, total amino acids, etc.) are also available.
It makes it easy to calculate these values as accurately as possible. The energy values for a new ingredient can be derived from the reference ingredient that is biologically and/or botanically closest to it, using ingredient-specific equations that consider the differences in composition between the reference ingredient and the new one. For ingredients that do not have a reference available, EvaPig® calculates nutritive values using the chemical values provided by the user and generic equations.
EvaPig® calculates energy values for two stages of pig production: the growing pig and the adult pig.

Reference tables

The data used in EvaPig® were obtained from two sources:

The reference values for chemical composition are derived from the INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ Tables published on the https://www.feedtables.com website since 2017. These tables are based on the data collected by the French Feed Database of the AFZ since 1989. This database, that includes several hundreds of thousands of samples with chemical and nutritional values, was used to establish a new and longer list of reference ingredients, their updated and representative chemical compositions.
The nutritional values for energy, protein, amino acids, and phosphorus, were obtained using expertise from INRAE and equations derived from in vivo measurements published in the scientific literature.

The values included in EvaPig® may be slightly different from the INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ data as the latter tables are updated on a regular basis. A few additional reference ingredients measured at INRAE for their nutritional values have also been included.
Because pig production is constantly evolving, EvaPig® will be regularly updated to reflect these changes, using newly available in vivo data about ingredients, either from the published literature or sent by the researchers themselves. If you are willing to help in the development of EvaPig® and its reference database, particularly by sharing such data, please contact us through the website https://evapig.com.