While soybean meal is a well-known source of protein in animal diets, it also includes other beneficial compounds. These include isoflavones, saponins and phenolic acids, bioactive peptides, and dietary fiber and functional lipids.
Tom D’Alfonso, worldwide animal nutrition focus area director for the U.S. Soybean Export Council, explains the value of accessing these compounds for pig producers looking to maximize efficiency in their operations.
“As crystalline amino acids got cheap, formulators started replacing soybean meal with synthetic lysine, methionine, threonine and now valine and isoleucine, and inclusion rates dropped. What we saw in commercial settings was that pigs on those low-SBM diets didn’t always perform the way the amino acid balance said they should — particularly health-challenged pigs and pigs under heat stress. That gap is what sent people looking at what else was being removed: the isoflavones, the bioactive peptides, the fermentable carbohydrates that feed the hindgut, the residual lecithin and phospholipids. So, it wasn’t a discovery so much as a re-examination, with better tools and a clearer economic reason to ask the question.”
“I think the practical message is that the response to additional soybean meal appears to be greatest when pigs are under some type of health or environmental pressure. In those situations, increasing soybean meal by roughly 10 percentage points or more has produced measurable responses in some studies. But I would not recommend adding 10 percentage points of soybean meal simply as a blanket strategy. We still need to understand the challenge, the starting soybean meal level, what is being displaced in the diet, and the economics.”
“So what I’d actually recommend is that a nutritionist put a minimum soybean meal constraint into the formulation rather than letting the optimizer take it to zero. Where you set that floor depends on your system. If you’re running a high-health, well-ventilated, single-source system with good biosecurity and synthetic amino acids are cheap, your floor can be lower and you may be leaving money on the table by carrying more. If you’re in a system with endemic respiratory pressure, multi-source pig flow, or you’re finishing pigs through a Southern summer, the floor should be meaningfully higher — and I’d set it seasonally rather than year-round.”
Read the full interview here.