Practical Formulation Using Corn Coproducts and Other Alternative Ingredients – New Research, Industry Trends, and Research Gaps

The use of corn coproducts and other alternative feedstuffs to help lower overall lower feed costs continues to be a major focus area for swine nutritionists. Over the last decade there has been a substantial amount of University and commercial research demonstrating the nutritional value of these feedstuffs and how to more effectively use them in practical swine diets. In general, the nutrient composition and digestibility values for corn coproducts (i.e. dried distiller’s grain with solubles and corn germ meal) and other key alternative ingredients such as wheat midds are well characterized. However, nutritionists are still faced with high variation in nutrient composition among available sources of these ingredients. To address this concern each source location should be identified individually in the nutritionist’s formulation program to fully account for these differences. Furthermore, nutritionists have concerns that published energy values for these ingredients are not accurate due to the high fiber content and need to be validated and (or) adjusted based on growth assays. Once the nutritionist can resolve concerns related to the nutritional value of corn coproducts and (or) wheat midds the next decision is how to effectively utilize them in practical diets. This should be a straightforward exercise given the surfeit of titration data on these ingredients; however, it may not be that simple when one considers the ability to use multiple high fiber ingredient sources in diet formulation. In this case knowing the maximum inclusion of an individual ingredient may be of lesser value than knowing the maximum level of a given nutrient (i.e. NDF) that limits inclusion of the combined high fiber ingredients. Additionally, when using corn coproducts and (or) wheat midds in the diet at higher levels it is important to understand the impact to other areas in the supply chain such as the feed mill (i.e. pellet mill throughput), farm (i.e. feed flowability), and processing plant (i.e. pork fat quality). Lastly, there has been considerable interest by nutritionists with new enzyme and (or) feed processing technologies that increase the overall value of corn coproducts and (or) wheat midds through improvements in energy and (or) amino acid digestibility, and in some cases livability.