Grinding feedstuffs increases their energy and nutrient digestibility, because the reduced particle size provides more surface area for digestive enzymes and microbes to act on. Currently, nutritionists recommend feeding corn ground to an average particle size of 650 to 700 µm. However, research has shown that corn ground to smaller particle sizes contains more metabolizable energy than corn ground to larger particle sizes, which leads to greater feed efficiency.

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that diets containing corn ground to reduced particle size can be formulated with less fat than diets containing corn ground to a greater particle size without compromising growth performance or carcass characteristics.

Buhler, Inc. of Minneapolis, Minnesota has developed a new fractionation process to more efficiently produce ethanol from corn. In this process, the germ is removed from the corn grain and the degermed grain is passed through roller mills and aspirators to remove the bran. The endosperm is fermented to produce ethanol, and the rest of the grain is left as a co-product, referred to here as HP-DDG_Buhler.