Nutritional value of fermented and not fermented material of distiller’s grains in pig nutrition

Digestion and performance experiments were conducted to investigate the nutritional value of microbially fermented distiller’s grains for growing pigs. Yorkshire x Landrace x Chinese Black pigs, with an average initial body weight (BW) of approximately 30 kg were used for both studies. The performance study was finished at a BW of approximately 60 kg. The distiller’s grains used in this study were the by-products of the Hunan Spirit Factory, in which sorghum and rice were the grains used for alcohol production. The material used for fermentation was a live bacteria (Hunan Wangshi Biotechnology Inc.) that can produce cellulase. Chemical analyses showed that the distiller’s grain used in this study contained 170.8 g/kg (in dry matter) of crude fibre, while the microbially fermented distiller’s grains contained only 96.7 g/kg of crude fibre. Meanwhile, crude protein was increased from 152.7 to 325.8 g/kg by microbial fermentation. The microbially fermented distiller’s grains also had higher (P<0.05) ileal apparent digestibility of crude fibre (24.9 vs 18.0%), crude protein (74.5 vs 41.9%), amino acids, and faecal digestibility of energy (70.3 vs 61.3%) than those of the distiller’s grains. The performance results show that 10% of a maize-soyabean meal based diet can be replaced by microbially fermented distiller’s grains, with no difference (P>0.05) in daily gain (795 vs 785 g) or feed efficiency (2.16 vs 2.20). However, the performance traits were affected (P<0.05) when the proportion of microbially fermented distiller’s grains in the diet was over 10%.