Nutritional Contents of DDGS Characterised

CANADA - Research underway at the University of Manitoba will help livestock nutritionists maximize the nutritional value of the by-products of ethanol production, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 17 March 2009
clock icon 3 minute read

A multi-disciplinary project being conducted by the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, is developing new lines of winter wheat, testing those lines in ethanol production and evaluating the co-products, in poultry, swine and cattle rations.

Associate Professor of Animal Science Dr Bogdan Slominski is responsible for the chemical characterization of the DDGS compounds such as protein and amino acid, fat, carbohydrates, fibre and vitamins.

Dr Bogdan Slominski-University of Manitoba

There are certain developments on the market in terms of cost of the feedstocks so those ethanol plants would sometimes use wheat entirely as a feedstock, they would sometimes wheat and corn and sometimes, if the price of corn is low, they will use corn in the production system.

We have to adapt a little bit to those changes and be able to predict the nutritive values of those co-products depending on the feedstock used for ethanol production.

The main objective here would be to determine the nutrient availability specifications and I would use only available energy, available amino acids and available phosphorus as an example.

These are the values which will be then used by the feed manufacturers in the formulas to achieve a good high quality broiler chicken or laying hen or hog production.


Dr Slominski says the nutrient specification data is almost complete and the next objective will be to validate the numbers in a large scale field trial to determine inclusion rates for these DDGS co-products and the benefits from their use.

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