Get More With A Quality Process & Quality Ingredients
A recent blog post over at WATT made some good points while discussing a topic many livestock producers debate – investing in high-quality ingredients versus inexpensive ingredients for feed. The author described a recent nursery pig formulation as follows:
“With a reasonable margin, I was able to add some really useful ingredients, the right additives at the right dosages, and still offered the formula at a final cost less than the competing product” [the competing product had only “cosmetic” additives].
This kind of thinking can either result in a livestock producer making a profit or losing money. The cost of feeding animals is 70% or more of the total costs of production. Because of this, one must consider the availability and prices of ingredients, which are always changing. Perhaps more than realized, the qualities of the ingredients are always changing, too.
We like to think of some ingredients as commodities – stable, giving you the same amount of available nutrients with each load. But, even for something as common as corn, this isn’t always true. In a blog I previously wrote, the metabolizable energy content of batches of US corn – a global “commodity”- for broilers, varied by 195 kcal/kg. This variation could easily affect performance.
If you’ve followed our posts here, we’ve described how our vast amount of research into our core products from our equipment has allowed us to thoroughly understand our processes and how the final products will perform. Our core products include high shear extruded whole soybeans (extruded full-fat soy) and ExPress® (extruded, pressed) soy meal.
Some examples of research we did and how it has helped our customers include improved digestibility and milk production in dairy, creating a consistent source of highly digestible nutrients, improved performance in layers, catfish, and swine, and what all of this means for diet formulations. In addition, we’ve recently released a portable NIR tool that our customers can use to control the quality of their processing, enabling the manufacture of consistent products as much as possible. Our NIR can also help customers understand and predict how much the meals vary in their particular operation.
To continue better serving our customers, we continue to perform research and develop resources. In 2016, we embarked on a project to evaluate amino acid digestibility and metabolizable energy in various samples of extruded, full-fat soy and ExPress® soy meal as assessed by university testing – just one of our latest efforts to allow you to get more from a quality process and the resulting quality ingredients. Interested in learning more? Send us a message.
