By TIM ALEXANDER
Illinois Correspondent

URBANA, Ill. — Researchers at the universities of Illinois and Missouri gave pork producers a reason to be optimistic when they announced in February that research has confirmed high-protein distillers dried grains (DDGs) can replace 100 percent of the soybean meal in a diet fed to finishing pigs, when fortified with crystalline Lysine, Threonine and Tryptophan.

The announcement provides pork producers a viable feed option to corn and soybean meal that could save them money, depending on market conditions and the availability of DDGs to the producer. This is according to Hans Stein, associate professor in the University of Illinois’ Department of Animal Sciences.

“This information had not been out there before,” Stein said of the research, which was first published in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Animal Science. “It’s good news to the pork industry because it gives them another feed alternative.

“If soybean meal and corn become excessively expensive, at any given time a producer can try high-protein DDGs and, based on the costs, make a decision about what is most economical for their situation.”

Stein declined to offer an opinion as to whether current market conditions make it more attractive to farmers to switch to high-protein DDGs – a fractionated co-product of ethanol production – as a primary feed source.

“We usually don’t go into economics because economics change every day,” he said. “If you are located right next to a plant that makes high-protein DDGs, it is less expensive than if you are located 200 miles away. It is a decision that needs to be made by the producer, the company or their nutritionist. What will not change is the biology, which is the information we can provide.”

The study, undertaken by a research team led by the UoI’s Stein, Beob Kim and Grant Peterson, along with Gary Allee and Buddy Hinson of the University of Missouri, found that high-protein DDGs contain more protein, but less fat and fiber, than conventional DDGs with solubles.

Research also revealed that replacing soybean meal with high-protein DDGs had no effect on average daily gain, average daily feed intake or feed conversion. Further, the study showed high-protein DDGs contain more digestible energy than corn.

“Digestible energy simply means that when you feed a feed ingredient to a pig, you can measure how much energy is in that feed ingredient,” Stein explained. “You measure what fecal energy comes out of a pig. If it went into the pig and didn’t come back out again, it was digested. It is the amount of energy a pig can digest and absorb.”

Crystalline Lysine, Threonine and Tryptophan are indispensable amino acids that must be blended with high-protein DDGs to produce a feed with full nutritional value, said Stein.

“The key thing is that when you add high-protein DDGs, you get almost the same amount of protein you get from soybean meal, but you don’t get enough of the amino acids the pig needs in its diet every day,” he said.

The Illinois Pork Producers Assoc. (IPPA) acknowledged the results of the study were encouraging to the state’s pork producers. “Hans Stein is one of the leading experts in this area,” said Tim Maiers, director of industry relations for the IPPA. “Any research that will give pork producers better information in improving swine nutrition and lowering feed costs will be a benefit to the industry.

“We will have to find a way to make DDGs more ‘user friendly’ for pork producers to allow both the livestock industry and the ethanol industry to coexist.”