The Elusieve process, a combination of sieving and elutriation (air classification), has been found to be effective in separating fibre from ground corn, DDGS and soybean meal (SBM), explain Radhakrishnan Srinivasan of Mississippi State University and co-authors there and Southern Poultry Research Inc., Agricultural Research Service, USDA, Mississippi State and the University of Georgia.

The objective of this study, published in Journal of Applied Poultry Research, was to determine the effect of removing fibre from ground corn, DDGS and SBM on broiler live performance during the 42-day experimental period and assess the economic effect.

A total of six dietary treatments were evaluated, in which three treatments incorporated an additional non-starch polysaccharide (NSP) enzyme corresponding to the following three treatments:

• regular diet
• direct substituted enhanced diet, and
• an isocaloric, isonitrogenous enhanced diet.

The study consisted of 48 pens with 45 male broiler chicks per pen.

Elusieve processing increased starch content of corn by 7.8 per cent and increased protein content of DDGS and soybean meal by 2.3 and 0.9 per cent, respectively.

Enhanced diets resulted in birds with 4.6 to 5.0 per cent higher bodyweight gain, higher breast weight by 7.1 to 11.3 per cent and feed conversion improvement by 4.0 to 6.0 percentage points (2.4 to 3.2 per cent) compared with regular diet.

There was no effect of NSP enzyme on performance and feed consumption.

Interaction effect (between NSP enzyme and dietary type) was observed only in two of a total of 12 performance indicators.

The increase in profit due to implementation of the Elusieve process in a 1,000-tonnes-per-day feed mill is estimated to be $0.5 to 2.5 million per year, which is 0.8 to 4.3 cents per bird produced. The payback period is estimated to be between 0.9 and 4.7 years.

Reference

^{Srinivasan R., B. Lumpkins, E. Kim, L. Fuller and J. Jordan. 2013. Effect of fiber removal from ground corn, distillers dried grains with solubles, and soybean meal using the Elusieve process on broiler performance and processing yield. J. Appl. Poult. Res. 22(2): 177-189. doi: 10.3382/japr.2012-00544}

June 2013