Hi-Gel™ Corn with Insta-Pro Extrusion: Tips for Use in Formulations
If you’ve followed us here over the past few years and weeks, you have read how Insta-Pro International has been developing high-shear dry extrusion procedures for extruding corn under our brand name Hi-Gel™ Corn.
Corn is many things, but for our purposes, consider the following:
- Corn is plentiful, traded globally, used in myriad diet formulations, and often relatively inexpensive.
- In terms of composition, it’s mainly starch, but also contains notable protein, and some oil.
- Corn can be improved through heat processing.
Often used as a source of energy in a diet formulation, the starch in corn is broken down into glucose in the intestine. Glucose is the most common sugar in the diet. In ruminant animals, like cattle, which have a giant microbial fermentation vat situated before the intestine, rumen microbes will quickly convert glucose into short-chain fatty acids (also called volatile fatty acids) that can be used for energy.
Notice that the starch in corn must be either broken down into smaller pieces (glucose), which are then either used directly, or are converted to something else (short-chain fatty acids) before becoming useful. As you might guess, there is a cost to the animal associated with this digestion. This is where processing comes into play.
High-shear dry extrusion from Insta-Pro is used to make Hi-Gel™ corn, an ingredient with starch that is highly gelatinized (90% or more) as determined by a starch gelatinization test. Starch that is thoroughly gelatinized makes these digestive and conversion processes more efficient.
These efficiency gains from Insta-Pro dry extrusion allow better animal performance (when Hi-Gel™ corn is used correctly) . Consider the following tips for proper and successful formulations:
- In work done at Iowa State University, broilers (during the critical starter phase) increased voluntary feed intake when Hi-Gel™ corn was used in place of ground corn.
- According to data from Penn State University, dairy cows fed a controlled amount of Hi-Gel™ corn (about 1.7 kg/cow/day), along with a better source of soy meal, exhibited enhanced milk production and feed ROI (milk/non-forage feed $) versus cows fed steam-flaked corn and canola meal. However, increasing the feeding level of Hi-Gel™ corn much beyond this amount caused performance reductions.
- Very recently, nursery swine work conducted at Iowa State University has reiterated that piglet voluntary feed intake closely follows dietary levels of available energy. As dry extrusion increases the amount of available energy in corn, this must be taken into consideration
Please contact us about using Hi-Gel™ corn in animal diets. Let us use our archives of data from animal and laboratory experiments to help you achieve the most success with this new ingredient.
