Benefits of Higher Fat Diets: Part 5, Recommendations
This is part 5, and the final post, in the blog series on why higher fat diet formulations are beneficial and should be used to feed animals. The others are listed below for your review:
- Part 1 – defines higher fat diets for different species and indicates that everything in this blog series will deal with nudging fat and oil (terms often used interchangeably) levels upward in a formulation, within ranges considered normal.
- Part 2 – beneficial effects of higher fat diets on intake and performance in poultry, swine, and dairy examples.
- Part 3 – explains fundamental, underlying reasons for the benefits of higher fat diets. Animals fed higher fat diets are actually physically different from those that are fed less fat, and absorb nutrients better.
- Part 4 – discusses what can come along with high quality fat sources, namely vitamin E and lecithin, and how this can be important.
So, now, what to do with this information?
As parts 1-4 highlight the many benefits of higher fat diets, how best to achieve this formulation goal?
The addition of isolated sources of fats and oils, like veg oils, animal fats, and blends (A-V blends, DDGS plus animal fat blends, and others), is always expensive relative to other ingredients. Where we are in Central Iowa, corn is about $0.05/lbs.; commodity, hexane-extracted (completely-deoiled) soybean meal may be $0.18/lbs.; and choice white grease goes for something like $0.30/lbs. So, per unit, fats and oils are expensive.
Secondly, you must always consider quality. As we’ve shown on the Insta-Pro blog before, there are tremendous quality differences between different types of fats and oils, and even within the same category of ingredients (i.e., “soy oil”). Don’t assume that all sources are equal because that’s far from the truth.
So, what are my recommendations for achieving the benefits of higher fat diets? Use meals that contain high-quality residual oil. We have documented, going back decades, how high-shear dry extruded full-fat and high-shear dry extruded/partially-deoiled (ExPress®) soy meals produce higher-quality meals that contain residual oil in the meal. And yet, these ingredients are categorized as meals – not oil – and thus, will be compared to other oilseed meals and similar ingredients.
The result is that diets with higher fat levels can be formulated using these meals, and the residual oils can be acquired at prices closer to what you would pay for a meal – often cheaper than if they were isolated from the meal. Removing isolated fats and oils, and replacing them with meals that contain high-quality oil, is almost always best for performance & economics.
This is really the ultimate goal – nudge up the fat levels in your diet, get the benefits of higher fat diets, and do it as inexpensively as possible. Let Insta-Pro help you with this.
