By LINDA McGURK
Indiana Correspondent

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Three years ago, when the ethanol industry was just starting to take off, little was known about dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), a co-product from corn ethanol production.

The quality was inconsistent at best, and farmers who were trying to figure out the value and economics of using DDGS as a livestock feed didn’t have much data to fall back on. Purdue University responded by launching its most comprehensive and interdisciplinary DDGS study to date, involving faculty from four departments.

Last week, they presented their results during an all-day conference on corn-ethanol co-products.

“Our extension faculty were getting a lot of questions about DDGS from livestock producers,” said Scott Radcliffe, an associate professor in the Department of Animal Sciences. “Corn prices were rising and DDGS were becoming more available, but we were having trouble giving recommendations because of the variability in the data and quality of the product.”

Radcliffe and other faculty from the departments of Agronomy, Agricultural Economics, Animal Sciences and Agricultural and Biological Engineering used four batches of DDGS donated from The Andersons’ 110-million-gallon-per-year ethanol plant in Clymers, Ind., as a basis for the study.

One batch contained DDGS produced with typical plant procedures, two had reduced levels of syrup and used different drying procedures and one contained no syrup at all. The idea was to examine whether relatively small changes in the production process in the ethanol plant would have a big impact on nutrient availability, economics and other aspects of using DDGS as livestock feed.

Because the project covered several species and addressed DDGS from many different angles, the researchers didn’t attempt to crown a single winner out of the four processes, Radcliffe said.
“It really depends on the species and what you’re trying to do with it, and whether you’re looking at performance, digestibility, manure composition or carcass character,” he explained.

In a few cases, the results contradicted the experience of some producers. For example, the research indicated that switching pigs from DDGS back to corn before slaughter to manage iodine levels reduces pig performance. But Joe Mann, co-owner of a 20,000-head wean-to-finish swine operation near Cloverdale, Ind., hasn’t noticed anything different since he started using DDGS eight months ago.
“We feed a lot of DDGS – 20 percent – and performance has been the same. I have nothing bad to report,” he said.

Mann started to feed DDGS to his hogs as a way to cut costs, and worked with a nutritionist to determine the inclusion rate. He buys from several different ethanol plants in Indiana, and thinks the quality of the DDGS is high overall.

“They (ethanol producers) used to look at DDGS as just a byproduct; they were only in it for the ethanol,” he said. “But now it’s become a very important source of income, so they’re all getting better.”

Paul Preckel, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, agreed that the quality of the DDGS has improved considerably since the Purdue study was launched three years ago. “Back then, it was a very different world. Nutrient levels were highly variable and the markets were still in the process of developing,” he said.

Initially, researchers weren’t even sure the product would be suitable as a feed ingredient and ideas for alternative uses, such as burning it with coal to produce electricity or spreading it on the fields as a fertilizer, were abundant. Preckel said those ideas seem “crazy” in hindsight.

“Heavens no, we shouldn’t burn it,” he said. “How naïve that seems, in retrospect. We should feed it to livestock because it contains a substantial amount of nutrients.”

Preckel’s part of the project examined the economics of DDGS, and using Nov. 14 prices he found it can be a valuable feed source, even though it’s not a direct substitute for corn or soybean meal and may require input of synthetics to rebalance the nutrition levels at high inclusion rates.

“We’ve seen that prices jump around quite a bit, so the valuation needs to be redone whenever prices change,” he said.
For more information about DDGS use in livestock and poultry, visit www.  ces.purdue.edu/bioenergy