Biofuel co-products as livestock feed - Opportunities and challenges

Utilization of feed co-products from wet or dry milling for beef cattle 91TABLE 22Performance of animals fed diets where 0, 33, 67, 100 or 133% of the NRC-predicted degradable intake protein requirementwas met with supplemental ureaDietF-Test0 33 67 100 133 SEM P-valueIndividually fedInitial BW (kg) 278 278 280 280 279 5 0.99Final BW (kg) 315 317 309 319 319 7 0.85ADG (kg) 0.48 0.47 0.42 0.46 0.47 0.03 0.77DMI (kg/day) 5.1 5.2 5.2 5.2 5.2 0.09 0.95G:F 0.200 0.185 0.167 0.185 0.189 0.004 0.54Pen-fedInitial BW (kg) 205 — — 204 — 0.5 0.10Final BW (kg) 263 — — 266 — 2 0.38ADG (kg) 0.70 — — 0.74 — 0.02 0.17DMI (kg/day) 5.4 — — 5.3 — 0.2 0.76G:F 0.102 — — 0.110 — 0.005 0.33Notes: BW = body weight; DMI = dry matter intake; ADG = average daily gain; G:F = gain-to-feed ratio; SEM = standard error of the mean. Source:Adapted from Stalker et al., 2004.1.2FIGURE 4Effect of dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS) supplementation on average dailygain (ADG) for growing cattle10.8ADG (kg/d)0.60.4ConfinementPasture0.200 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2Supplemented DDGS (% BW)Source: Adapted from Griffin et al., 2012.REPLACEMENT HEIFERSLoy et al. (2004) concluded that DCGF decreases feed costscompared with conventional hay feeding when fed overthe winter for developing heifers on a commercial Nebraskaranch in the Sandhills. In their study, a treatment system(TRT) was compared with their conventional managementusing more than 550 heifers in each group across twoyears. The TRT utilized only grazed winter forage and DCGFsupplementation, and was compared with some wintergrazing, with hay and protein supplementation. No performancedifferences were observed in developing heiferperformance in the two treatments. The major implicationwas reduced costs through the winter while maintainingexcellent performance and reproduction. A similar experimentwas conducted using DDGS (Stalker, Adams andKlopfenstein, 2006). Because of the higher energy contentof DDGS, a smaller amount was needed to meet proteinand energy requirements of these bred heifers (1353 heiferswere used). Feeding DDGS and grazing winter rangewith heifers led to slightly better winter gains and positivechanges in body condition score compared with the hayfed,control heifers. Pregnancy rates were 97 percent forboth treatments. Most important were the savings in feedcosts from using DDGS and winter range versus a conven-