Utilisation of glycerol in porcine feeds

Abstract

The development of agricultural chemistry is going to supply by-products that can be used in animal feeds. It is necessary to study their effects on growth performance, meat quality, as well as their economic interest in order to know if they can be efficiently used in animal feeding.

The development of diester production via the transesterification of rapeseed oil will supply glycerol. The use of this by-product seems to be possible in animal feeding. The experimental data available show that glycerol introduced at the dose of 5% in pig diets does not mo-dify palatability and has no detrimental effect on growth performance, feed energy conversion ratio and carcass composition. Some parameters of meat quality are improved : drip loss is decreased and the intramuscular lipid content is increased, being both beneficial for processing and the sensorial quality of meat.