BANFF, Alta. – Increased competition for grain has encouraged European pork producers to use alternative feeds from the food processing and bioenergy sectors.
“The utilization of coproducts is quite high in animal feed,” said Coen Smits of the Nutreco Swine Research Centre, an international feed and genetics company based in the Netherlands.
Western Canada is just beginning to explore alternative feed, but in the Netherlands as much as a third of hog rations includes byproducts such as distillers grains, wheat starch, whey and steamed potato peels. These provide energy and protein concentrates and are often fed in a liquid form, he told the Banff Pork Seminar Jan. 18.
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Lower feed intake reduces costs and these products are generally on par nutritionally with more traditional rations.
In Europe each emerging coproduct is evaluated in terms of risk because of the increased number of processing steps, which could mean more things going wrong with the feed.
About 500 products are listed on a Dutch feed database with complete analyses of their value as feed, how to use them, storage, transportation and potential hazards.
The industry also assesses nutritional value including crude protein, fibre and net energy, which is the energy content of individual macronutrients found in a feed.
Producers also need to know how much of the alternative feed is available, if it is a seasonal product and how much variability to expect from each processor.
Investigations are conducted with producers because they want to know the digestibility of each product for sows, growing and finishing hogs and piglets. Many of these products are not digestible for piglets.
Many of these products are high in fibre so the industry examines intestinal health as well as interactions of high fibre on amino acid and lipid digestibility. Producers prefer mixed diets where no one coproduct dominates the feed and causes diarrhea, ulcers or poor digestion.
“It is one of the reasons we limit the use of coproducts to some extent,” Smits said.
Ruurd Zijlstra of the University of Alberta expects more coproducts to be fed in Western Canada, including canola meal, wheat byproducts, oat groats, sugar beet pulp and distillers grain from wheat and corn. Distillers grain has less value as a swine feed.
Many of these products have been fractured for use as human food or the bio-processing market.
However, some of the fractions can be used as animal feed, especially for those with high nutritional demands such as weaner pigs.
“We actually serve as a nutrient recycler for society as a whole,” he said.
It is important to assess some of the limitations in terms of digestibility.
For example, distillers grain may not work well in swine diets, while ruminants can handle the fibre more easily.
“When you deal with these coproducts, the primary market will be the dairy industry, then the beef and then swine,” said Zijlstra.
Ingredient variability occurs and more research is required on individual products because they offer different ratios of energy and fibre content. In some cases enzymes may have to be added to improve digestibility.
Sugar beet pulp has a lot of fibre and acts as a nitrogen trap in the intestine. The nitrogen appears in the feces rather than urine so less ammonia is released.
Higher value coproducts such as canola oil, oat groats, protein isolates and concentrates are often high in digestible fat or protein, which is good for weaner pigs.
Crude fibre digestibility varies widely among the cereal grain fractions, although protein digestion appears similar to other feeds.
Another possibility is linseed meal and oil from flax. It may be included in diets for added omega 3 fatty acids, although more research is needed to see how these change the intestinal microbial population.
Whole oats cannot be fed because pigs cannot handle the hull. If it is removed, the resulting groat is palatable and highly digestible, especially for weaner pigs.
