Database Research Summaries2018 Benefits of Soy based Amino Acids in Growing Cattle Diets Nebraska Soybean Board
Research Focus
The focus of this project is to “evaluate the effects of rumen protected lysine, provided in the diet as SoyPass, on cattle growth and efficiency in order to increase efficiency when formulating rations.
Objectives
- Measure the performance response (weight gain and feed efficiency) of growing calves to inclusion of SoyPass in the diet.
- Determine the optimal inclusion of SoyPass in diets fed to growing calves.
- Improve our understanding of the lysine requirement of growing calves.
- Increase N use efficiency when formulating diets for growing cattle.
Results
- Forage based growing diets for-mulated with low- levels of distillers grains (< 20%) may be deficient in metabolizable lysine, which could be corrected by the inclusion of SoyPass.
- Cattle demonstrated increased performance when fed the 35% distillers diet compared to the 20% because both dietary energy and me-tabolizable protein balance were improved.
Importance
- SoyPass could be used to meet a lysine amino acid deficiency in growing cattle diets. Data gathered from this research project would be used to verify this.
- With the large cattle industry present in Nebraska (1.5 million calves born in Nebraska and 5 million finished in feedlots each year}, inclusion of soy products, even at low levels of the diet, represent a sizable market opportunity.
- Feeding 2 million calves SoyPass at 5% of the diet for 30 days would result in a market for approximately 1 million bushels of soybeans.
For more information about this research project, please visit the National Soybean Checkoff Research Database.
Funded in part by the soybean checkoff.
