The year's abnormal growing conditions are expected to result in a higher use of dried distillers grains with solubles, a byproduct of ethanol production, in livestock rations.

Dr. Martin Nyachoti, an animal science professor with the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says depending on the price of other feed ingredients there's every indication using DDGS will reduce feed costs.

Dr. Martin Nyachoti-University of Manitoba

Generally for the growing pig you probably want to have about 10 per cent no more that because you start seeing an impact in performance of those animals.

Values as high as high as 30 per cent has been suggested for sows but I think it's probably safe to say that you need maybe 15 to 20 per cent in a sow ration.

In terms of the adjustments, DDGS has concentrated levels of various nutrients compared to the initial cereal grain so I guess one has to take that into account when formulating the diets so that you can still have adequate diets without over-supplying nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus which we know are not only expensive but if you have large amounts being put into the environment it'll cause problems.

The other thing with DDGS is that they tend to have high fibre content so feed intake might be an issue as well to consider so how much one is going to put into the diet might impact the amount of feed that the pigs are able to consume.

So those are some of the considerations that I think one should be aware of.

Dr. Nyachoti notes a lot of data has been generated quantifying the digestible nutrient content of DDGS and he encourages producers to consider those numbers when formulating rations.