Hello. I am Jimena Ibagon I am a master student at the Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory at the University of Illinois. And today I am privilege to share with you data from one of the experiments we conduct on Digestibility of energy, protein, fat, dry matter and concentration of metabolizable energy in sunflower meal and sunflower expellers fed to growing pigs.

To give a background about sunflower production in the 2021 and 2022 crop year, 57.26 million metric tons of sunflower seed, were produce in the world.
The most prominent producers were Ukraine, Russia, and the European Union with countries as Italy, Hungary, Bulgary and around of 76% of the world's sunflower production is concentrated is those countries.
Approximately 80% of all sunflower seed were crushed to produce sunflower oil for human consumption and Sunflower meal.

Sunflower meal is one of the most important co products of sunflower seeds. And it has been used as a good alternative source of amino acids for poultry and swine.

However, even if we know that sunflower meal has a high content of protein, the nutritive value and quality of the meal may vary due to variation in cultivation methods, place of growing and difference in the oil extraction process depending on the crushing plants.

All seeds before being crush for the oil extraction process undergo a process called de-hulling process, which consist in the removal of the hull, partially or total, from the seeds and this is a very important step because it affects the final quality of the meal because of the high fiber content on those hulls. And in some crushing plants those hulls are added back to the meal at the end of the oil extraction process. Increasing the fiber in the final product. 

There are two important oils extraction process that I am going to explain briefly, the first method is the expeller process which consist in the crushing of the seeds, for the obtention of the oil. 

The second oil extraction method is the solvent extraction process, which follows the expeller pressing process but to this process the solvent extractor is added, this is to increase the obtention of oil from the meal. In some crushing plants the oil is degummed and those gums are putted back in the meal. And for that reason content of oil may change from 1-10% in the different Sunflower coproducts.

Indeed, data demonstrated that the standardized ileal digestibility of crude protein and amino acids is dependent on the extraction process of sunflower co products when fed to pigs. Likewise, it has been demonstrate that the presence of high content of fiber in diets decreases metabolizable energy and as well as digestibility of energy and nutrients in growing pigs which is very important because of the content of fiber in the Sunflower coproducts but it is still unknown if there are differences in the apparent total tract digestibility of nutrients and in the concentration of digestible energy or metabolizable energy in Sunflower coproducts.

Therefore, the objective of this experiment, was to test the null hypothesis that there are no differences in the apparent total tract digestibility of gross energy, crude protein and fat or in the metabolizable energy concentration among sources of sunflower co-products.
Now let’s move on to the materials and methods that we used to conduct this experiment. We had a randomized complete block design with eight diets four blocks and eight replicates per diet.  As an experimental unit we had 64 growing pigs with an initial body weight of 31 kilo approximately, and for the sample collection those animals were housed individually in metabolic crates where we had a seven-day of adaptation to the diet and five days of urine and fecal collection using the marker to marker approach.
 
So now I would like to quickly explain to you the diets that we used for this experiment. We have 8 diets, one of those was a corn-based basal diet and 7 sunflower meal-based diets.

We had the sunflower meal from 4 different regions of origin, we receive 2 sunflower meal from the United States, 2 from Ukraine, 1 from Hungary, 1 from Italy, and the Sunflower expeller was received from the United States with that we formulated 7 diets using each source of sunflower co product and corn, and a control diet containing only corn to complete 8 diet in total. Those pigs were fed at three times their maintenance requirement.
 
For the statistical analysis we use the mixed procedure of SAS and we used 2 models; for the first model, we had as a fixed effect the sunflower sources and block and animal as the random effect, we use multiple comparison for separation of the means, and for the second model, to compare the sunflower expellers with sunflower meal sources we used a contrast statement with sunflower coproducts as a fixed effect and block and animal as a random effect. 

Let’s move on to the results, and I want to start by taking about some nutritional characteristics, but before to start, I would like to set up my slides. As you can see for sunflower meal sources we have in light and dark blue sources from United States, in yellow and orange we have sources from Ukraine, and in light and dark grey we have sources from Hungary and Italy respectively, and finally in the right side of the slide we can find the sunflower expeller in green. 

So to begin with, I'd like to look at Acid hydrolyzed ether extract, and we observed big differences in terms of fat content among sunflower sources, it could be attributed to the addition of gums during the oil extraction process to the meal by the end of the process, resulting in the increased oil concentration. Likewise we can see a big difference in the concentration of fat in the sunflower expellers compare with sunflower meal sources and it is due to the absence of the solvent extraction step in the oil extraction process.

For gross energy, we observe and average of 4,200 kcals per kilogram in sunflower meal sources, but for sunflower expellers we observed a greater concentration of energy and it is because there is a positive correlation between energy and fat.

So if we look at total dietary fiber, for this slide I have in the straipped pattern of the columns the soluble dietary fiber and in the solid part of the column the insoluble dietary fiber, variations in content of fiber could be possible because of the de-hulling process. However, we can observe that sunflower expeller has high concentration of insoluble dietary fiber as well, even more than some of sunflower meal sources. 

In addition, this is reflected in the concentration of crude protein, we can see the negative correlation between fiber and protein in this slide, and some of the sunflower meal sources with high concentration of fiber, had lower concentration of protein, including the sunflower expeller, and it is because higher concentrations of fiber in the diet may release lower concentrations of crude protein.  

Moving on to the results of digestibility of nutrients we observe a statistical difference between digestibility of dry matter among sunflower meal sources and we had an statistical difference between sunflower meal and sunflower expeller where the sunflower expeller had a lower digestibility of dry matter.

On digestibility of gross energy we observed a statistical difference in the sunflower meal sources where one source of United States and the Italy source had lower digestibility of energy, possibly because of the content of fiber on those sources. And we observed a statistical difference between sunflower meal and sunflower expeller and it can have the same reason, high content on fiber that is reflected in the digestibility of energy. 

Moving into apparent total tract digestibility of fat as expected we observed that those sources with more content of fat, had a greater digestibility of fat, and the sunflower expeller had a greater digestibility of fat than the sunflower meal sources. 

For the digestibility of crude protein we did not observed any differences among sunflower meal sources and it could be probably because of the variation in nutrients, but we observed a statistical difference between sunflower meal and sunflower expeller where the sunflower expeller had a lower digestibility of crude protein in the sunflower meal sources. 

Lest talk about digestible and metabolizable energy, and for digestible energy, we did not have difference between sunflower meal and sunflower expeller. But we had a statistical difference among sunflower meal sources, and those sources with lower content of insoluble dietary fiber had a greater values for digestible energy, and for the metabolizable energy almost same history lower contents of fiber reflects a better metabolizable energy than the other sources of sunflower meal, and there is not difference between sunflower meal and sunflower expeller in terms of metabolizable energy. 

With that we came up with some conclusions, the first one is that, nutritional composition varies among sunflower coproducts, possibly because of the extraction process.

We observe only minor impact of region on the digestibility of energy and nutrients among sunflower meal sources, and we observed as well that the digestibility of energy in sunflower meal was greater than the sunflower expeller.

And our final conclusion was that there is not difference in digestible energy and metabolizable energy between sunflower meal and Sunflower expeller. 

Thank you very much for listening to my presentation on digestibility of energy in  sunflower meal and sunflower expellers when fed to growing pigs and if you like to know more about the research conducted in the Hans H. Stein monogastric nutrition laboratory please check out nutrition.ansci.illinois.edu.