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Checkoff research shows value in soybean meal

Soybean growers are funding additional animal nutrition research through their checkoff program.

Don Wyss from Indiana is on the United Soybean Board and serves as the animal nutrition working group’s leader.  He tells Brownfield the board has been working with nutritionists focused on using more soybean meal in animal diets. “That would include poultry, dairy, pig, and aquaculture. Naturally, by far, that is our number one customer, the livestock industry.”

Wyss says more than 40 nutritionists have shared their experience with soybean meal, and the research is showing a lot of encouraging data including, “Increased economic return on that inclusion of more soybean meal into the improved performance and efficiency on that rate of gain in the pig, that broiler, or that laying hen.”

And Wyss says the researchers are continuing to study the impacts of soybean meal on animal diets. “They’re spending a lot of time looking into those anti-viral and anti-inflammatory effects that are reducing and show positive signs through that research of reducing that negative impact of rate of gains.”

And, he says the research helps build value for farmers.  USB research shows increasing soybean meal crude protein by 1% increases soybean meal value by $10.27 for swine and $12.62 for poultry per metric ton of complete feed.