Manitoba’s producers are trailing cattle producers in other parts of Western Canada when it comes to using dried distillers grains, said Jennilee Bernier, a master’s student at the University of Manitoba.
“I think producers out west, they use it a lot more in feedlots,” said Bernier. “(But) we’re hoping that we can make cow-calf producers in Manitoba aware of it and realize that it could potentially be a really great supplement to use.”
The recent expansion of the Husky ethanol plant in Minnedosa, Man., means that DDGs are readily available to livestock producers.
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“The Husky plant … it used to be 12 million litres a year, now it’s going to 130 million and talking of expanding beyond that,” said Hushton Block, an Agriculture Canada researcher at the Brandon Research Centre, who’s conducting trials feeding wheat-based DDGs to beef cattle.
His study has two parts. One looks at the production benefits of feeding DDGs – such as weight gain, feed intakes and back fat thicknesses. The other part is focused on how adding protein to forage, with DDGs, affects processes in the cow’s rumen and the production of methane.
“The ultimate objective for this research project is to figure out what happens in terms of biological re-sponse in the cows when we supplement with (DDGs),” Block said. “One of the major losses of energy from beef production once the feed has been digested … is the use of some of the digested feed by the rumen microbes to produce methane.”
Similarly, Bernier studied the effects of boosting the amount of protein in the feed.
“We wanted to prove that methane emissions would be lowered as the cows’ protein requirements were more accurately met,” she said.
Bernier did her trials for her master’s thesis in animal science. She divided 30 beef cows into three groups and each was fed a different diet. One herd was fed a forage diet of 50 percent hay and 50 percent straw (five percent protein), another forage supplemented with 10 percent DDGs (10 percent protein) and the third diet was forage with 20 percent DDGs (13 percent protein).
Results won’t be known for months.
