ExPress® Soymeal for Swine: A Consistent & Quality Ingredient Supported by Research
The swine industry is continuously looking to improve economically important characteristics and rely on feeding strategies to determine dietary energy and protein sources to use. Therefore, making high-quality ingredients that have consistent energy concentration and digestible nutrients should be the goal with a focus on selecting ingredients at the least possible cost. Given the variability in composition and elevated current price of fats, and that in most situations when adding fat, producers should evaluate the return over feed cost, it is necessary to consider available alternatives as energy sources.
High-shear dry extruded/partially de-oiled soymeal, ExPress® soy meal with 6-8% residual oil, provides not only amino acids but also more energy which makes it a unique ingredient to simplify swine diets. Many studies have been conducted and support the advantages of using properly extruded soymeal in swine diets. I’ll mention some of them conducted in the last years.
Woodworth et al. (2001) determined that growing pigs showed increased apparent amino acid digestibility and metabolizable energy when fed ExPress® meal versus solvent-extracted, dehulled soybean meal. This response was observed whether ExPress® meal had been dehulled or not prior to extrusion. It had similar amino acid digestibility and metabolizable energies to ExPress® meal processed with the hulls left on. Those results were further confirmed by Rodriguez et al. (2020) determining 3.6% greater standardized digestibility of amino acids and metabolizable energy concentration (609 kcal/kg) in pigs fed ExPress® with respect to solvent-extracted soybean meal. Those values are useful to formulate diets accurately and will determine the animal performance.
It is aligned with the Insta-Pro statement “animals don’t lie”. Therefore, it is crucial to perform animal feeding trials to determine if the highly digestible amino acids and energy concentration in diets with ExPress® are available for pigs to improve growth performance. Studies conducted by Webster et al. (2003) and Benz et al., (2011) have demonstrated a consistently improved feed to gain ratio in those fed ExPress® compared with those fed solvent-extracted soybean meal has been observed. A study conducted recently by Blomme et al. (2022) observed that nursery pigs fed increasing concentrations of ExPress® have improved feed to gain and caloric efficiency. It was also estimated that ExPress® contains 479 kcal/kg greater net energy (productive energy) than soybean meal.
Besides the potential feed savings associated with pigs being more efficient as reported in the previously mentioned studies, producers and integrators should consider that processing soybeans through a controllable process allows the opportunity of additional feed-savings. ExPress® soymeal is a high-quality ingredient suitable for swine diets that can be precisely controlled, formulated, and simplified to reduce diet costs through decreasing the amount of costly synthetic amino acids and fats/oils.
