Using Better Corn – Get What You Can
With every ingredient, there is a certain total amount of nutrients and energy. Based on the composition and total weight of each ingredient, there is simply a point beyond which no further nutrients can be extracted.
If you have 1,000 kg of soy meal, which contains 45% protein and 2.7% lysine, you have 450 kg protein and 27 kg of lysine available. That is only the mathematical total, not what’s available for use when fed to an animal. You must consider how much each animal will consume each day in total; of the total, how much of each ingredient will be consumed each day, the nutrient composition of each ingredient, and how digestible each nutrient is (a measure of what disappears from the digestive system and becomes useful for productive purposes), and how each diet should be formulated to provide the correct balance of digestible nutrition for the animal. This last part is determined by performing animal feeding studies, the “gold standard” for animal nutrition work. All of this happens in order to maximize the production of animal food products such as meat, milk, and eggs while minimizing both the input volume and cost.
You will have noticed that we’ve done a lot of work on dry extruding corn, using our high-shear extrusion process. For example, using data from Dr. Carl Parson’s lab at University of Illinois, we showed that by taking corn and putting it through a grinding process, such as hammer milling, about 83% of the total energy is now available for use by chickens. The remaining 17% of the available energy is lost to the surrounding environment. Simply put, it can be used directly by the birds to make chicken meat or eggs.
However, when this milled corn is subjected to the high-shear dry extrusion process, significantly less energy is lost with about 95% of total energy being made available for productive purposes.
Considering the following:
- In every animal diet formulation, there is an energy requirement that is met by the energy contained in several ingredients.
- Energy is nearly always the most expensive component of a diet formulation. Energy is expensive.
- Often, energy requirements are met by the addition of fats and oils, like grease and veg oils. Fats and oils are expensive, especially now.
- Therefore, there’s a lot of economic and diet formulation room to take ground corn and make it better with the high-shear dry extrusion process. Corn might normally be 1/6 the price of fats and oils.
Speak with us about how you can get everything you can from corn via the high-shear dry extrusion process and reduce or eliminate expensive ingredients like fats and oils.
