Foreword and Supplemental Information , Swine Day

It is with great pleasure that we present the 2016 Swine Industry Day Report of Progress. This report contains updates and summaries of applied and basic research conducted at Kansas State University during the past year. We hope that the information will be of benefit as we attempt to meet the needs of the Kansas swine industry.


Foreword
It is with great pleasure that we present the 2016 Swine Industry Day Report of Progress. This report contains updates and summaries of applied and basic research conducted at Kansas State University during the past year. We hope that the information will be of benefit as we attempt to meet the needs of the Kansas swine industry.

K-State Vitamin and Trace Mineral Premixes
Diets listed in this report contain the following vitamin and trace mineral premixes unless otherwise specified.

Note
Some of the research reported here was carried out under special U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearances that apply only to investigational uses at approved research institutions. Materials that require FDA clearances may be used in the field only at the levels and for the use specified in that clearance.

Swine Day 2016
Biological Variability and Chances of Error Variability among individual animals in an experiment leads to problems in interpreting the results. Animals on treatment X may have higher average daily gains than those on treatment Y, but variability within treatments may indicate that the differences in production between X and Y were not the result of the treatment alone. Statistical analysis allows us to calculate the probability that such differences are from treatment rather than from chance.
In some of the articles herein, you will see the notation "P < 0.05." That means the probability of the differences resulting from chance is less than 5%. If two averages are said to be "significantly different," the probability is less than 5% that the difference is from chance, or the probability exceeds 95% that the difference resulted from the treatments applied.
Some papers report correlations or measures of the relationship between traits. The relationship may be positive (both traits tend to get larger or smaller together) or negative (as one trait gets larger, the other gets smaller). A perfect correlation is one (+1 or -1). If there is no relationship, the correlation is zero.
In other papers, you may see an average given as 2.5 ± 0.1. The 2.5 is the average; 0.1 is the "standard error." The standard error is calculated to be 68% certain that the real average (with unlimited number of animals) would fall within one standard error from the average, in this case between 2.4 and 2.6.
Using many animals per treatment, replicating treatments several times, and using uniform animals increase the probability of finding real differences when they exist. Statistical analysis allows more valid interpretation of the results, regardless of the number of animals. In all the research reported herein, statistical analyses are included to increase the confidence you can place in the results.