Editor's Note
The current issue of the newsletter contains the following:
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Two research reports: one on energy digestibility in corn co-products, and one on calcium digestibility in canola meal. -
A podcast on aspects of fiber nutrition in pigs. -
One new publication from the Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory.
I hope you will find this information useful. To subscribe to the newsletter, please visit http://nutrition.ansci.illinois.edu/newsletter.
Sincerely,
Hans H Stein
Research Reports
With the prices of cereal grains rising, opportunities to reduce feed costs by using alternative ingredients are being explored. One source of alternative feed ingredients is co-products from the human food industries. However, little information has been published on the digestibility of energy in these ingredients. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to determine the concentrations of digestible and metabolizable in hominy feed, bakery meal, corn gluten meal, corn gluten feed, and corn germ meal, and to compare these values with values obtained for corn and distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS).
When formulating diets for pigs, it is more accurate to use values for standardized or true nutrient digestibility than values for apparent nutrient digestibility because the former are additive in mixed diets. No values for standardized or true total tract digestibility of calcium in pigs have been reported. The true total tract digestibility (TTTD) of a nutrient is calculated by correcting apparently total tract digestibility (ATTD) by total endogenous losses, which may be estimated using a regression procedure. To our knowledge, no measurements of the endogenous loss of calcium in pigs have been reported. An experiment was, therefore, performed to measure endogenous loss of calcium and to determine TTTD of calcium in growing pigs, and to investigate if the addition of microbial phytase to the diets affects TTTD of calcium. In addition, calcium retention was measured in pigs fed diets containing varying levels of calcium with or without microbial phytase.
Podcast
April 11: Aspects of fiber nutrition in pigs
Dr. Hans H. Stein examines the effects of feeding different forms of dietary fiber on energy utilization and nutrient digestibility in swine diets. Dr. Stein also discusses physical, chemical, and enzymatic treatment of fibers to improve their utilization by pigs.
Publications
Rojas, O. J. and H. H. Stein. 2012. Digestibility of phosphorus by growing pigs of fermented and conventional soybean meal without and with microbial phytase. J. Anim. Sci. 90:1506-1512.