Researchers fine-tune nitrogen in pig diets

Kansas State University swine nutritionist Jason Woodworth says 70% of the costs in swine production relate to feed — a figure that can be reduced by substituting conventional crude protein sources like soybean meal with synthetic amino acids. While that practice cheapens rations, it creates imbalances in amino acid to crude protein, which caused Woodworth and other researchers at Kansas State University to investigate how to economically formulate swine diets while keeping growth on track. “When adding target amino acids and removing some of the crude protein that comes with the soybean meal, we can get into deficiencies of other non-essential amino acids or some of the other active components that soybean meal brings to the diets,” he said in a university news release. In turn, Kansas State University master’s student Jessica Smallfield completed multiple feeding trials looking at the effects of standardized ileal digestible lysine to crude protein ratio on the growth performance