Folic acid, a B-complex vitamin, is very important nutrient for women and mammals. For women, the use of folic acid alone or in multivitamin supplements could improve their health status and be effective for the primary prevention of neural tube defects. For mammals, folic acid has the single and important biochemical function to accept and release one-carbon units. Moreover, lactation increases the demand for folic acid to improve the concentrations of choline, creatine, creatinine and carnitine, as well as milk proteins in milk.

However, in the previous researches, folic acid supplementation gives good results in women and cows, not in sows. Was the folic acid supplementation level too low to obtain satisfying results in sows? To answer this question, a team of researchers led by YIN Yulong in the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) supplemented folic acid in sow diet to investigate the influences of supplementation with different levels of folic acids in diet on the performance of lactating sows.

"We offer Twenty Landrace × Yorkshire sows the same basal corn–soybean diets (folic acid, 1.3 mg kg−1) from gestation to parturition (day 107). After parturition, sows were allotted to four treatments: control group (folic acid supplementation level, 0mg kg−1), group 1 (12.5mg kg−1), group 2 (50mg kg−1) and group 3 (100 mg kg−1), with five replicates of one sow. The experiment lasted for 21 days.” said Dr. WANG Shengping. “The research results suggest that supplementation with folic acid in the diets of lactating sows increases milk production, improved milk quality and the performance of piglets.”

This research was jointly supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30972118, 30901040, 30928018), the Cooperative Projects of Guangdong Province and Chinese Academy of Science (2009B091300043, 2009B091300079, 2009B091300089) and nitrogen and phosphorus cycling and manipulation for agro-ecosystems, the Knowledge Innovation program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-YW-T07).

The study entitled “Effects of folic acid on the performance of suckling piglets and sows during lactation” has been published in the October issue of Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, details could be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsfa.4469/abstract.

The supplementation with folic acid in the diets of lactating sows improves the performance of piglets. (Image by ISA)