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.