A multi-disciplinary team of scientists with the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, is characterizing the nutritional components of distillers dried grains with solubles and evaluating those products in cattle, swine and rations.

DDGS samples from different processing plants are being evaluated for nutrient composition and nutrient availability in animal diets and assessed in feeding trials.

Dr. Martin Nyachoti, who is in charge of the swine component of the project, says the information being gathered will be of particular value to those formulating livestock rations.

Dr. Martin Nyachoti-University of Manitoba

Characterizing the availability of nutrients or digestibility of nutrients and making that data available is very critical because, in order for someone to formulate a diet that is adequate and optimizes the performance of the animals, you must know something about the digestibility of nutrients in the feedstocks that you're using.

So, by making this data available, we hope that people that are charged with the responsibility of formulating swine diets will be able to do so more accurately because they will have the digestibility coefficients to use in their formulas to make diets that are reflecting more closely the nutrient requirements of the pigs.

So subsequently the people that formulate diets, nutritionists and producers that mix their own feed.

Dr. Nyachoti notes, the product does change, depending on the combination of feedstocks used to produce the ethanol, which poses challenges because it changes the nutritive value of the product so one question is, when you change the combination of feedstocks, how does that influence the DDGS?

He says the goal is to complete the digestibility experiments and produce specification sheets, within the next year or so, that will outline the availability of specific nutrients in each of these products.