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.