Insta-Pro High-Shear Dry Extruded Ingredients In Cornell University Dairy Nutrition Database
Formulating diets for dairy cows is challenging for a few reasons. Mainly, everything the cow consumes enters the rumen, which is a massive microbial fermentation vat that alters and degrades everything it encounters. This highly-complex digestive process is best viewed through the lens of survival – the microbes enable cattle and other ruminants to eat materials that are difficult to digest, like grass (humans and non-ruminants can utilize essentially no nutrients from these ingredients), and extract energy and nutrients from it to feed cow and microbe alike. While great for helping the dairy cow survive and even thrive, in modern animal production systems, this is a challenge as dairy nutritionists seek to fine tune feeding programs to maximize performance (milk yield, milk fat, and milk protein mainly) while minimizing input costs (mainly ingredients in a complete diet).
It doesn’t make any sense to feed cows an expensive diet if the rumen will simply degrade or alter key ingredients to the point that they are not effective at boosting performance. So, you must have information on, and experience with, using a variety of ingredients that will construct an effective dairy formulation.
Cornell University in the USA maintains a database of ingredients that can be used to formulate dairy diets. The database feeds into several commercial software packages that dairy nutritionists use to construct diets. Each ingredient is characterized by up to 150 data points that help to define and predict how each will function in a complete diet that will contain many other ingredients.
Two ingredients, produced with Insta-Pro high-shear dry extrusion technology (and in the case of soy, are also produced using a mechanical oil press to reduce residual oil levels), are now included in this database:
- Insta-Pro Hi-Gel™ Corn
- Insta-Pro ExPress® soy meal
Please review the follow blog posts to understand the unique benefits of each ingredient. The blogs highlight dairy applications, and this information, along with the data in the dairy database at Cornell, will help you put together efficient, productive formulations for dairy producers.
- ExPress® soy meal – an excellent source of rumen by-pass protein (here and here)
- ExPress® soy meal – an excellent source of rumen by-pass fat in the residual oil of the meal (here and here)
- ExPress® soy meal – an ingredient that enhances rumen fiber degradation (here)
- Hi-Gel™ Corn – highly-gelatinized starch for boosting rumen microbial protein (here)
