Ration Tips for Using Distillers Grains
By Jerry Bertoldo

If you have a commercial herd of dairy cows or beef animals, chances are you have someone who can balance diets for you. The nutritionist may work for a feed company or as an independent consultant. The person is undoubtedly familiar with the particulars of feeding dry distillers grains (DDGS) but might not recommend putting it into your ration. Poor results in the past from highly variable DDGS makes some nutritionists take a “wait and see” strategy concerning local distillers.

Livestock farmers who don’t use a nutritionist miss the luxury of having someone sort out the details that lead to a reasonable decision on whether or not to feed distillers. There are lots of calf raisers and backyard beef operators who could feed the product, but they need some guidelines. That’s the purpose of this article: to give some tips on feeding DDGS and offer you opportunities to save money and get good performance results.

Thumb Rules for DDGS use

• Limit DDGS to a maximum of 40% of diet dry matter (DM) in finishing steers, 20% in dairy heifers and 10% of dairy rations. These recommendations are based on DDGS being 12 to14 % fat. Lower fat DDGS will allow heavier inclusion in dairy diets.

• In growing or milking cattle you cannot replace all the cornmeal in a diet with DDGS unless you feed high levels of corn silage.

• If DDGS represents a high percentage of the diet protein, you must use other protein sources with significant lysine content such as soybean, fish or blood meal.

• If hay crop is the main forage source, particularly as dry hay, and distillers is maxed out, attention to rumen available nitrogen or degradable protein is important. It would be appropriate to add urea into the diet.

• Including DDGS with a base of good corn silage and/or high quality hay or haylage will result in a ration high in energy. While this is a good formula for finishing steers, growing heifers will trend towards excessive body condition.

• Calcium supplementation is essential in growing animals when pushing high DDGS inclusion rates.

DDGS is usually worth the extra cost per dry matter ton versus the wet or “modified” product. With the wet product, you’ll see spoilage by four to five days past manufacture in the summer and seven to 10 days in the cold weather.

Jerry Bertoldo is the dairy specialist with the Northwest New York dairy, Livestock and Field Crops Team. Contact him at the Batavia office. Tel: 585-343-3040. Ext. 133. Email: grb23@cornell.edu

To learn more…
Information meetings on distiller grains production and use will be held in July at the following locations:

• July 10th @ CCE – Orleans Co. office, 12690 State Route 31, Knowlesville, 7-9:00 p.m. in the Harrington Room
• July @ Noblehurst Field House, York Rd., Pavilion
• July 23rd @ CCE-Ontario Co., office, 480 N. Main St., Canandaigua, 7-9:00 p.m. in the Auditorium
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