News from the Midwest Sectional Meetings, March 16-18, 1998, Des Moines, Iowa
Contact:
Trygve Veum, University of Missouri (573) 882-4331
Joe Marks, University of Missouri(573) 882-6546
Fish meal helps cut costs of pig ration, in studies at the University of Missouri
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Fish meal and spray-dried blood cells helped cut costs of weanling pig rations by up to $126 a ton, animal scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia reported this week.
"The alternative protein sources were just as effective as traditional spray-dried animal plasma," said Trygve Veum, MU swine nutritionist, at the meeting of the Midwest Section of American Society of Animal Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa.
Veum, Qiang Zhang and David Bollinger compared weanling pigs given 6 percent spray-dried plasma, 4 percent plasma supplemented with fish meal or blood cells, and 2 percent plasma supplemented with fish meal and blood cells.
The pigs performed equally well on all combinations. But feed costs were lower when fish meal and blood cells replaced part of the plasma. Spray-dried animal plasma costs $2 a pound, but fish meal costs just 30 cents and blood cells cost 56 cents a pound.
"We lowered feed costs $63 a ton each time we took out 2 percent of the plasma," Veum said.
The least expensive diet in the MU experiments was one that had just 2 percent plasma supplemented with 2.76 percent fish meal and 1.53 percent blood cells. That diet was $126 a ton cheaper than one with 6 percent plasma.
In related research, the MU scientists compared performance of weanling pigs getting fish meal in place of soybean meal. "All the pigs did well, whether we had fish or soy meal in the diet or whether the pigs got 2 or 4 percent blood plasma," Veum said.
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