Source: Michael Fielding, MEATINGPLACE, 9/7/16


Researchers at the University of Illinois collaborating with colleagues at China Agricultural University in Beijing are close to determining the nutritional value of wheat bran in pig diets. Wheat bran, like many other co-products from the human food industries, contains more fiber than both corn and soybean meal, which adversely affects energy digestibility.

"To save on feed costs, more producers are turning to co-products,” Hans H. Stein, professor of animal sciences at Illinois, said in a news release on his U of I website. "Therefore, there is a need to determine the energy contribution from fiber-rich ingredients. But the effect of dietary fiber on heat production and net energy of diets is unclear."

Growing barrows were fed diets containing 0, 15 or 30 percent wheat bran. The pigs were housed in metabolism crates inside calorimetry chambers built to measure gas exchange and heat production.

The digestible energy (DE), metabolizable energy (ME) and net energy (NE) in the diets declined as more wheat bran was included. The DE content of diets containing no wheat bran was 3,454 kcal/kg, compared with 3,161 kcal/kg in diets containing 30 percent wheat bran. The ME content of the diets decreased from 3,400 to 3,091 kcal/kg, and NE content decreased from 1,808 to 1,458 kcal/kg.

The paper, "Wheat bran reduces concentrations of digestible, metabolizable, and net energy in diets fed to pigs, but energy values in wheat bran determined by the difference procedure are not different from values estimated from a linear regression procedure," was published in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Animal Science.

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