August 19, 2014

19/08/2014: Animal feed trials at HGCA

by Tom Blacker, from a visit to Cereals UK
GFMT’s Tom Blacker spoke exclusively to Dr Jos Houdijk, Reader in Animal Nutrition and Health at Scotland’s Rural College, about this development.

The UK’s Home Grown Cereals Authority gave an exclusive presentation to Grain and Feed Milling Technology about its new steps in the world of animal feed. Usually researching and providing essential services in the wheat and cereals areas, animal feed is a new sector it is entering into with European partners.

Dr Jos Houdijk, Reader in Animal Nutrition and Health at SRUC
Processing grain in a feedmill requires a lot of quantity.
Companies such as Cargill would tell us to come back with an amount as large as 500 tonnes to process as a minimum, the man from HGCA told me.

He found a small pilot plant in France, working with quantities between 100 to 300kg.

“We packed up 12 batches of variety specific whole seed grains on a ship to Paris and Bordeaux and they will be processed and sent back to us,” says Dr Jos Houdijk, Reader in Animal Nutrition and Health at Scotland’s Rural College.

“We are now in the process of characterising their chemistry and putting them through [feeding] chickens and pigs for the research work.

“In the end, what we are trying to achieve is to say to levy payers that different varieties of rapeseeds may have a different feeding value when it comes to the effect on a pig or chicken.

“It is going to be a long process to improve the varieties and improve the nutritional qualities, even from a mix of varieties. Nevertheless, if for arguments sake we suppose that the range of varieties are split by half: a good side and a bad side, and if the bad ones can be phased out, quicker than the good ones, then by definition, it should go up in quality: this is what we are trying to achieve,” he added.
HGCA hopes to get the first results out in the open by the end of 2014.

It will not be in time for drilling seeds this year but hopefully for next year’s drilling. Growth trials will follow when HGCA understands the effect of grain variety on digestible energy and standardized ileal digestible amino acid levels.

Grower pigs may expect 7.5 percent of their feed to be formed by these varieties and older pigs at 10 to 12 percent.

In poultry, the level will be at about five percent.

This new type of formulation will mean HGCA can go higher in information and advice on using rapeseed for two reasons: first, the information it does have is 10 to 15 years old, the new information will mean that feed formulations can go higher in the amounts of these varieties used; second, a country like Canada is using much higher levels of rapeseed meals with pigs without any side effects in production.

Therefore, the potential must be there for the UK, HGCA extrapolates.

“In Canada they use more current data than us, in feed formulations based on standardised ileal digestible amino acids and net energy levels. Here, we use that on values from books that do not tell us information about these varieties, which are the differences.”


The effects on the animals should hopefully be better digestibility of proteins from one variety compared to another. If we know the digestibility of protein and other minor assets in the protein it’s better.

We can then recommend using that variety in feed formulations. This also means using lower amounts of the other varieties in the feed matrix when comparing varieties with soy, he says.

Benefits will include the feed industry being more actively able to accordingly formulate diets to requirements.

“We can make better use of the differences between varieties. In the past, it was not possible.

“We will have a lot of data at the end of this year that will hopefully be published in papers and on the HGCA website,
” he says.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine GFMT
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


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