Dr. L. Lee Southern, Professor Emeritus, School of Animal Sciences, LSU Agricultural Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, US, presented the committee'‘s work.

“The National Research Council (NRC) is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. It publishes for any species of animals. It calls itself an unbiased source. It can only use peer reviewed published literature.“

“If there was no published data or change, we didn’t make a change. The vitamin information is exactly the same as in 1998.“

“There have been no new published papers on vitamin content in feed ingredients. There is a large quantity of vitamins. It’s expensive to analyze and there is very little investigation that has been done. If published, we can use it, but if it comes from a vitamin company, we can’t use it, as the end user might find it biased.“

According to the published Swine NRC 2012, there are no data on the vitamin composition of many of the agricultural coproducts and few recent vitamin composition data are available on any ingredient, but most, if not all, nutritionists add a vitamin mix to swine diets that more than meets the vitamin requirements of pigs.

Dr Southern stated: “One of the decisions we made when we met to revise the new feed ingredient database, is that literature had to be published in a journal that had undergone peer review. The challenge was how to find that information. There is no electronic means of doing that. All had to be done by hand, no matter the animal.“

The committee focused on the last 15 years, except for amino acid digestibility, because very little data was available using only the last couple of years. There were ten people on the committee and “the majority agreed with this approach“, according to Dr Southern.

“There is lots of data on corn meal and soybean meal, lots of data on the digestibility of amino acids in corn and digestibility statistics of corn byproducts from the ethanol industry. On corn byproducts, there is no vitamin content, as there is no published data.“

The committee was given the task of reviewing feed additives. “This area has changed greatly since 1998, especially antibiotic growth promoters“, stated Dr. Southern.

The feed ingredient data base for the NRC (2012) was completely revised to update contents and availabilities of nutrients in feed ingredients. The data base contains 122 feed ingredients, each with a separate page, not including fats, mineral sources, amino acids and feed additives, and approximately 130 nutrient or proximate analysis data points.

The official tasks given to the 2012 NRC were the following:

• Information about feed ingredients from the biofuels industry and other new ingredients
• New knowledge about energy utilization by swine, including net energy systems and values, will be added (Digestible Energy, Meatabolisable Energy and Net Energy)
• Requirements for digestible phosphorus and concentrations of digestible phosphorus in feed ingredients.
• Review of the effects of feed additives
• Review the effects of feed processing
• Strategies to increase nutrient retention and thus reduce fecal and urinary excretions that could contribute to environmental pollution
• Update the computer model to calculate nutrient requirements
• Tables of feed composition will be expanded with relevant new information
• Future areas of needed research will be identified

To purchase a copy of the National Academies of Science 11th Revised Edition of 'The Nutrient Requirements of Swine', click here for UK or click here for US.