Variable Quality Limits Inclusion of DDGS in Swine Rations

Alberta Agriculture and Food says variable quality remains a key obstacle to increasing the inclusion of co-products from ethanol production in swine diets.

With the increased emphasis on the use of grain based ethanol as fuel, distillers dried grains are becoming more readily available for inclusion in livestock rations.

Pork research scientist Dr. Eduardo Beltranena says overheating or over drying of these co-products will significantly affect quality.

"Lysine and methionine are the two amino acids that are damaged faster than the others and reduce the quality of the DDGS significantly.

"In contrast to protein or amino acid damage, overheating or overdrying the DDGS increases the phosphorus availability of distillers grains.

"The other issue with processing is the amount of solubles added back.

"With corn they usually add all the solubles back to the DDGS.

"With wheat, triticale and rye it's just a partial addition of the solubles back into the mixer.

"Also the amount of solubles affect amount of soluble fibre that pigs can ferment in the hind gut as well the amount of solubles added can affect the caking of the distillers grains and feed beans and the flow of it in processing equipment.

"Some plants will tend to over dry in order to reduce the amount of lumps and reduce caking but at the same time they are causing some protein damage and amino acid availability damage".

Dr. Beltranena notes, right now, there's considerable variability among these coproducts and a lot of that variability has to do with whether the ethanol plants are processing wheat alone, corn alone or a blend of wheat and corn.

He says corn DDGS tends to have a higher fat content and wheat DDGS tends to have a higher protein content so the performance of the animal consuming the product can vary according to its source.