González-Vega, J. C. and H. H. Stein. 2012. Amino acid digestibility in canola, cottonseed, and sunflower products fed to finishing pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 90:4391:4400. Link to full text (.pdf)

Stein, H. H. 2012. Swine NRC revisions explained: Part 2. Pages 12-14 in Feedstuffs, October 29, 2012. Link to full text (.pdf)

Research has shown that grinding cereal grains in diets fed to pigs into smaller particle sizes improves growth performance. Feed ground to smaller particle sizes has more surface area on which digestive enzymes can work, so digestibility of energy and nutrients that are enzymatically digested may also  improved. Generating specific data on energy and nutrient digestibility will help determine the optimal particle size for feed ingredients.

An experiment was conducted to determine the concentration of digestible and metabolizable energy and to measure the apparent (ATTD) and standardized total tract digestibility (STTD) of phosphorus by growing pigs fed diets containing corn that was ground to different particle sizes.

Kim, B. G., D. Y. Kil, Y. Zhang, and H. H. Stein. 2012. Concentrations of analyzed or reactive lysine, but not crude protein, may predict the concentration of digestible lysine in distillers dried grains with solubles fed to pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 90:3798:3808. Link to full text (.pdf)

Protein sources of animal origin provide highly digestible protein in diets for weanling pigs. Chicken meal consists primarily of skin, flesh, and sometimes bones from processed birds. Poultry by-product meal contains offal from processed chickens, including  feet, necks, beaks, undeveloped eggs, and intestinal contents. AV-E digest consists of enzymatically hydrolyzed spent hens and extruded egg albumin, mixed with a soybean meal carrier. Ultrapro is produced from enzymatically hydrolyzed porcine intestines, which are used in the production of the drug heparin. There is a lack of data on the concentration of digestible and metabolizable energy in all of these ingredients, which limits their use in diets fed to weanling pigs.

An experiment was conducted to determine the concentrations of digestible and metabolizable energy in chicken meal, poultry by-product meal, Ultrapro, and AV-E digest, and to compare these values with soybean meal.

Stein, H. H. 2012. The nutritional quality of feed ingredients. Pages 69-77 in Proceedings of the Chinese Swine Industry Symposium, Shanghai, October 24-26, 2012. Link to full text (.pdf)

Distillers dried grains with solubles, or DDGS, is a co-product of the rapidly growing ethanol industry. DDGS has been increasingly used for swine diets because of its affordability and nutritive value. Corn DDGS is high in energy, amino acids, and digestible phosphorus.

In the last few years, more ethanol plants have started  to use centrifugation to extract oil from DDGS for use in the production of biodiesel. The resulting DDGS products contain less fat than conventional DDGS. Reduced-fat DDGS products would be expected to have decreased digestible (DE) and metabolizable (ME) energy concentrations compared with  conventional DDGS, but energy values for these products have not yet been reported.

An experiment was conducted to determine the concentrations of DE and ME in three sources of distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) containing different fat concentrations. In addition, the effect of supplementing diets containing reduced-fat DDGS products with corn oil to increase DE and ME concentrations was determined.

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 use of corn in the production of food for humans. Only limited published information is available on the digestibility of phosphorus in corn co-products derived from the human food industry.

Phosphorus from plant sources is often bound to phytate, which decreases the availability of the phosphorus to the pigs because pigs do not produce the enzyme phytase. The addition of microbial phytase to diets containing corn and soybean meal increases phosphorus digestibility in these ingredients. However, no data have been published on the effect of adding phytase to diets containing hominy feed,  bakery meal, corn gluten meal, corn gluten feed, or corn germ meal.

Therefore, an experiment was performed to determine the apparent (ATTD) and standardized (STTD) total tract digestibility of phosphorus in hominy feed, bakery meal, corn gluten meal, corn gluten feed, and corn germ meal, and to compare these values to the values obtained for corn and DDGS. The effect of the addition of microbial phytase to the diets on the digestibility of phosphorus in the experimental ingredients was also measured.

Due to the increasing demand for protein for livestock feeding, the interest in using canola meal in diets fed to swine is increasing. Canola meal is a product of the rapeseed plant, an abundant oilseed crop grown in Canada, the Northern United States, and parts of Europe. Recently, new varieties of canola that contain more protein and less fiber than conventional canola have been selected. The de-oiled meals of these varieties have a concentration of crude protein that is close to that of de-hulled soybean meal.

It has been speculated that changes in the traditional pre-press solvent extraction oil removal procedure may improve the quality of canola meal. The traditional procedure involves use of heat to desolventise the de-oiled meal, but a new procedure allows for production of canola meal using a low-temperature procedure.

There is no information about the digestibility of energy in high protein canola meal. There also is no data comparing the digestibility of energy in canola meal processed at low temperatures versus high temperatures. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to compare the concentrations of digestible energy (DE) and metabolizable energy (ME) in high protein, high-temperature-processed, low-temperature-processed, and commercial canola meals, and to compare these values with the DE and ME in corn and soybean meal.