Jeffery Escobar

Soybean products are the most important source of dietary protein for poultry in the US and much of the world. Variation in protein quality among soy ingredients can occur due to processing. Full fat extruded soybeans (FFES) are an alternative to conventional solvent-extracted soybean meal (SBM), but may have higher levels of trypsin inhibitors (TI). The use of exogenous protease in poultry diets ...

Copper (Cu) has been widely used at pharmacological levels (e.g., 125 ppm) as growth promoter in poultry. However, the mechanism by which high levels of Cu promote growth remains to be determined. It is commonly recognized that Cu exerts anti-microbial effects in the gut but there is not much direct and consistent data showing that Cu alters the population of bacterial species in birds. The object ...

Introduction Heat treatment of soybean meal (SBM) causes amino acid (AA) damage, particularly to lysine. Further, birds and pigs cannot use heat-damaged AA for growth. Lysine is the first- and second- limiting AA in corn-soybean meal diets for pigs and poultry, respectively. Currently, there is no reliable laboratory analysis for the determination of digestible lysine in soybean meal. The objecti ...

Introduction Inclusion of high levels of byproducts can reduce diet cost but tend to also decrease growth performance due to low nutrient digestibility. Dietary enzyme supplementation may be a viable solution to increase byproduct inclusion while maintaining growth performance. Materials and Methods Pigs (337 × C-22, PIC, Hendersonville, TN) weaned at 21 days (d) of age were housed (21 pi ...