Guests: Dr. Chad Paulk, Kansas State University and Dr. JT Pope, Nutritionist at House of Raeford Farms Today’s podcast is part of a continuing conversation started during the Real Science Lecture Series, where we look deeper into the impact of thermal processing on protein quality and the forms of thermal processing in the industry.
Guests: Dr. Chad Paulk, Kansas State University and Dr. JT Pope, Nutritionist at House of Raeford Farms
Co-host: Dr. Zack Lowman, Balchem
Today’s podcast is part of a continuing conversation started during the Real Science Lecture Series, where we look deeper into the impact of thermal processing on protein quality and the forms of thermal processing in the industry.
Dr. Chad Paulk mentioned there are two major categories of thermal processing, ingredients and complete diets. Complete diets in the U.S. use thermal processing most often in the pelleting process via steam conditioning and frictional heat and is a combination of heat and moisture. On the ingredient side, by-products or co-products are processed by heat most often to pull moisture or pathogen control. (4:11)
Drs. Chad Paulk and JT Pope agreed there are a wide variety of effects thermal processing has on protein. Thermal processing can “unfold” proteins and provide access to enzymes, which aids in digestibility. But if you expose protein too much, they start to bind to sugars and actually prevent them from being digested. (7:02)
Dr. JT Pope mentioned that in the Southeast especially, pelleting is a winning situation due to economic reasons. Dr. Chad Paulk added to that idea by saying the higher the ingredient cost, the greater the value of pelleting. For swine especially it is influenced by location and access to feed. In the poultry industry a large percentage pellet feed. (20:57)
Dr. JT Pope discussed that thermal processing can negatively impact enzymes. It’s important to understand the enzymes you’re feeding and how they will survive the pelleting process. It is possible through formulations and other methods to ensure the enzyme survives the pelleting process. (26:30)
Dr. Chad Paulk and Dr. JT Pope agree that the strategy for pellets is dependent on the outcome you are looking for. If the intention is for a high-quality pellet more heat may be used, but you may lose some nutritional density. If the focus is on available enzymes, the pellet may not be as high quality. More research is needed to create a high-quality pellet with the same enzyme availability. (30:28)
Dr. JT Pope emphasized this is a complex process and there is a lot left to learn. For now, pelleting and thermal processing being in the middle is ideal because over processing can be bad, and so can under processing. Dr. Chad Paulk added it’s important to know your ingredients and your supplier and understand how different factors influence the pelleting process. (49:18)
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Scott Sorrell (00:07):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange. The pubcast where leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal agriculture. Tonight, we're continuing a conversation started during the Real Science lecture series where we looked deeper into the impact of thermal processing on protein quality. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell one of your hosts here at the Real Science Exchange. Tonight, we welcome back Dr. Chad Paulk from Kansas State University. Chad is an associate professor of feed science and management in the department of grain science and industry. Chad, this is your second trip to the exchange. You were a guest of your colleague Dr. Jordan Gephardt. So welcome back to the exchange. It's always good to see a familiar face once again. First, before we get started, tell us what are you drinking tonight?
Dr. Chad Paulk (00:57):
Well, I'm currently in the office so I'm drinking water, but I do want to give a shout out to my favorite brewery Terrapinn and Athens. I think with the dogs being number one in the country, they deserve a good shout out.
Scott Sorrell (01:10):
Yeah. Before we get started, tell us how you got started.
Dr. Chad Paulk (01:12):
Okay, I'm a swine nutritionist by training. And about three years ago, I joined the feed science group here at K-State where we do a lot of feed processing research and it all started with doing phytase stability work. And a lot of this came from the poultry industry. And that's actually how I initially got connected with JT as he was kind of doing the same thing in his PhD work at NC State. So we had a lot of conversations about it, and just the opportunity to connect feed research and poultry research really just pulled me into the poultry side of things. Really got interested in how feed processing and feed manufacturing influences both pigs and chickens. And so that's really what got me into the poultry side.
Scott Sorrell (01:58):
Alright, cool. So you've already mentioned your guest. JT, would you mind introducing him just a bit more?
Dr. Chad Paulk (02:04):
Yeah. So JT was a PhD student at NC State when we first met. We did a lot of back and forth discussing phytate stability, enzyme stability, the pelleting process, and how we influence things and JT you're currently with-
Dr. JT Pope (02:20):
I'm with House of Raeford, and I'm a nutritionist with House of Raeford.
Scott Sorrell (02:24):
Well, then the next question would be JT, what's in your glass tonight?
Dr. JT Pope (02:29):
I'm in Chad's same situation. I checked with my boss earlier and they said bourbon wasn't okay. Again, a bottle of Dasani. You know but whenever we leave here, I might have a Miller. We'll see. But yeah, it's good to be here. I would love to have a glass with me, but it was a no go.
Scott Sorrell (02:51):
Okay. If you were drinking bourbon, what would it be?
Dr. JT Pope (02:53):
Most of the ones I've had are from Sazerac. So the Eagle Rare and, and some of the Blanton's, those types. Buffalo Trace. I, yeah, so that's that's if I drink bourbon, that's usually where it's from.
Scott Sorrell (03:09):
All right. Very well. Well, thanks for joining us tonight. Tonight, my co-host is Dr. Zach Lowman. Zach's been here many times with me. Zach is Balchem's monogastric technical service lead. And so welcome back, Zach. And are you in the same situation of the other two gentlemen?
Dr. Zack Lowman (03:27):
I'm not, I'm working in my office from home. And I'm actually going to Mexico this weekend, so I've got a fruit smash to get a little a beach thing going.
Scott Sorrell (03:36):
All right. Cool. Yeah, that's good. So Zach, how did you get to know these two gentlemen? I understand you've known them before.
Dr. Zack Lowman (03:44):
We've known each other for quite a few years, just from conferences and meetings and things that we've ran into each other at. And JT and I actually overlapped a little bit at NC State while we were finishing up our PHD's.
Scott Sorrell (03:55):
All right. Very well. All right. Let's get started, gentlemen. Chad, we're going to talk tonight about the impact of thermal processing on the quality of protein. So let's start by talking about the various forms of thermal processing that are deployed in the industry.
Dr. Chad Paulk (04:12):
Yeah, so I think he can think about thermal processing. There's two major categories that I'll put it into. It's either on the ingredient side, or the complete diet side. And on the complete diet side, it's going to be the pelleting process. You know, if you go internationally, there might be some extruded products. There may be some expansion, but here in the US we're pretty much just dealing with pellet mills, which is steam conditioning. And then you have frictional heat when you're pushing that through the die. And there's also some pressure in there as well. The other thing is on the ingredient side. It really just depends on what ingredients you're feeding and what the process is. Most of the time, It's going to be your, what I would call by-product or co-product ingredients that are going to go through some additional heat processing step where there's a drying to pull the moisture out, or maybe a heat processing for pathogen control or that extrusion step as well. So it can vary from soybean meal, to distiller's grains, bakery by-product meal, kind of just depends. And you know, when you think about some of those byproducts, especially like bakery or something through the food industry, it may have been previously cooked, turned into waste, and then repurposed and then processed again. So it might've actually gone through multiple heat steps in certain instances.
Scott Sorrell (05:41):
Okay. I was going to kind of ask you about the thermal processing, that specifically soybean meal- cause I know that was a topic of discussion during your webinar. You know, what are the purposes? Is that done, I guess, at the plant for mostly processing purposes and not necessarily to improve the quality or digestibility the protein in the product, is that correct?
Dr. Chad Paulk (06:04):
Yeah, so there's you know, without getting into too many details, I think the main-. You have the heating process that helps remove the hexane and the solvent extraction, but the main value of the heating step, whether it's through solvent extraction processing, or even if you have a mechanically or extruded expelled soybean meal, it's it's to optimize that quality. So you have to kind of find that balance of first, you want to put enough heat on it to get rid of your anti nutritional factors, your trypsin inhibitors or urease. And then, but not too much so that you're not binding, mainly lysine, in that process as well. So really the importance of that heat step is to get rid of those anti nutritional factors. And that's why we want it on there.
Scott Sorrell (06:54):
Does thermal processing, does it benefit or harm protein utilization or both?
Dr. Chad Paulk (07:00):
I think it's both. You know protein has a very dynamic structure with all these bonds and things that are in different forms. And I think if you get a certain amount of thermal processing on it, you start to unfold those proteins, and when you unfold them, you're providing access to enzymes. So that enhances the digestibility. But then if you do too much, they start to bind to certain sugars and things of that nature that prevent them from being digested. I think the other thing, thermal processing is a very broad term. It's really a combination of temperature, moisture pressure. I'm sure there's some other things, too. pH, stuff of that nature that can influence the degree of thermal processing and how it influences improving or decreasing protein quality.
Scott Sorrell (07:57):
Okay. JT, has he been right on target so far? Anything you want to add to that?
Dr. JT Pope (08:01):
Yeah, I think just to mirror what he said. I think of anything in thermal processing works kind of like a quadratic curve, you know, where a little bit of it is a good thing. And then once you go too far with it, it starts to- you're no longer getting a benefit from it and you're starting to hurt yourself. So I think everything in thermal processing is figuring out where do you optimize the process?
Scott Sorrell (08:26):
Okay.
Dr. JT Pope (08:27):
Because if we don't do enough of it, we're not improving digestability. If we overprocess it, then we are hurting digestibility. So I think, I think everything works on a curve. Yeah.
Dr. Chad Paulk (08:38):
Yeah. I agree. I think we're also, we're getting to this stage, too, where we are having to balance nutritional value with also feed or food safety value as well. And so that, that quadratic curve I agree with, but then you have to also consider if you have different objectives and sometimes people may be willing to give up some nutritional value to make sure there's no salmonella or PED or anything like that as well. So you really have to just kind of understand what's your core objective and what's the value of the thermal processing and the cost associated with it.
Scott Sorrell (09:19):
How would you gentlemen characterize the quality of the soybean meal that's coming out of the commercial operations these days?
Dr. Chad Paulk (09:26):
I'll let JT comment on this mess. He's probably dealt with it more than me, but from a research standpoint and the publications that are out there, the quality is good. The variability is low. You know, our digestibility on the key components are high. So I think the quality is good, but I also think the better we get at doing our jobs, there's chance to capture more value. And so all the quality is good there. That doesn't mean there's not room for improvement too, in how we do things and what we understand.
Scott Sorrell (10:07):
Yeah. So JT, are you seeing-. Well, first of all, are you measuring the protein quality of the incoming ingredients, specifically bean meal and some of your other commodities?
Dr. JT Pope (10:18):
Yes. Yes. We have a wet chemistry lab, and several in ours that we measure quality on, but we focus primarily on its nutritional quality. If you get bad bean meal, you know, it, you can, you can look at it and tell if it's been overprocessed. Finding the under process to bean meal was a little more difficult to spot with the eye. And, and we will occasionally use suppliers to help us identify plants that have, let's say high levels of trypsin inhibitors. It's not something we typically do in-house, but the largest changes we see in quality are typically- you're depending on harvest. And we also get quite a large variation regionally based on where we're sourcing it from. So from the Southeast, at times we might get a higher protein value soybean meal versus something we brought in on rail at the Midwest, or vice versa. It just depends on the crop year. So this current crop year, at least for us internally, it looks like our values. Our protein values are a little bit higher than they were for the 2020 trial.
Scott Sorrell (11:29):
Okay. And then how often will you measure and test the commodities coming in?
Dr. JT Pope (11:35):
Soybean meal, we test every load. Because there's- typically every load. They have guarantees that they have to meet. I think NOPA sets those standards, and if they don't meet those minimum requirements, we actually start docking them on how much we're paying them. So there's a margin center for us to test every load of soybean meal.
Scott Sorrell (11:57):
Yeah. And then I'm assuming you'll reevaluate, or reformulate the diets basis, the content of the protein, the quality of the protein in that soybean meal.
Dr. JT Pope (12:09):
That's correct. What this time of year is always, we expect to see some changes and potentially major reformulations. But like Chad mentioned, they do a pretty good job at being. They do a pretty good job at providing consistent product because that's what's in their interest and we graph all of this information out and it's kind of interesting because it almost looks like a sin wave, you know, where they don't want to give away too much protein. So they kind of their levels will creep up, and then they'll say, okay, we're giving them enough, then they'll creep down and then we start docking them, and then they creep it back up and it just moves like a sin wave all the time. So so we keep a very close eye on it, and we do reformulate based on the quality. At least the protein quality that's coming in.
Dr. Zack Lowman (12:57):
So do they blend that, like different loads to kind of keep the protein where they want it? Or do they just happen to be pulling out a different bins each time?
Dr. JT Pope (13:05):
My understanding of the way that works is it probably depends on the amount of hulls they blend back into it. And that's, that's a major way that they're controlling the protein content. We also have the ability to dock them if they send us high fiber soybean meal as well. So I think they're constantly playing with the fiber that's going back in through the hells to ultimately determine their final protein content. And yeah, these guys, most of them now are using inline NIR technology to make sure that they're giving you a consistent product.
Dr. Chad Paulk (13:41):
Yeah. If I understand that correctly, what you said, there's NOPA standards, which are based off fiber, protein, and moisture. And that's what you're setting your contracts on to submit those claims.
Dr. JT Pope (13:52):
That's correct. Yeah. So all, all three of those, we're testing every single load because it's a potential way for us to reduce our cost. Yep.
Scott Sorrell (14:02):
Chad, can you talk a little bit about you know, what you typically would like to see measured and some, some protocol recommended protocol that you use in testing incoming ingredients?
Dr. Chad Paulk (14:17):
Yeah. So I mean, what I like to see measured as a university professor and so-called scientist is everything, right? And that's not practical. But I mean, the first thing is protein, just like JT said. When you have these contracts set up, that's where you're gonna save money, reduce costs is making sure you can base it on the NOPA standards, your contracts and, and capture that value there. I think the next degree of detail is your amino acid profiles, which that analysis gets more expensive. And JT, I don't know, do y'all actually measure lysine and amino acids at certain times to make those adjustments, or do you have prediction equations based on proteins?
Dr. JT Pope (15:05):
We will occasionally send off samples to some of our amino acid suppliers to look at the amino acid levels. But generally, we're using an equation based system. And the R-squared value isn't very good on some of those, but it's about the best we can do without spending an exuberant amount of money. So we don't have much choice other than that, you know. So we're basing our amino acid values off of our protein level. Folks are pushing the NIR to do this type of analysis, and I don't think I've seen enough of it to comment on whether it's accurate enough to trust. It certainly does a great job with protein and kind of your basic proximates, but a lot of people are applying equations to their protein calculation to back figure amino acid levels. So that would be a cheaper way to get after it, rather than trying to use HPLC on all of these samples.
Dr. Chad Paulk (16:06):
Yeah, I think a lot of times too, when I think about the analysis and where I've utilized them the most is almost like a diagnostic tool. For instance, we've had a scenario where we're working with a producer on the pig side, nursery pigs, and we switched from one soybean meal source to another, and then also we had scouring issues. And so increase in scours, and then when they switched back sources to a different supplier on the soybean meal side, they went away, right? So that could be, there's no telling if that's coincidence or not, but then when you start to dive into it, it's like, okay well, what do we need to measure? Cause crude protein is probably not going to tell you the answer there. So that's when some of these other things come into play is, can you look at KOH solubility to see if maybe it's over-processed or under processed, if you can't visually see it, like JT mentioned. Do you need to look at your oligosaccharide content, which is kind of a whole separate discussion? Do you need to look at trypsin inhibitors or urease. The urease and trypsin inhibitor, from the data I've seen, those pretty much go hand in hand from a correlation standpoint. Urease analysis is a lot cheaper.
Dr. Chad Paulk (17:29):
You just look at the change in pH. But, so it's almost becomes a kind of scavenger hunt of how do you piece together all these different analytical techniques to determine, is there something different in there's two suppliers that's leading to scours? Which we know undigested protein can lead to different GI issues. So the potential's there, but trying to determine it that's the true cause or if it's something else, you know.
Scott Sorrell (18:00):
During the webinar, we had several questions come in, that we were unable to get to Chad. So I put a few of those and here. I got one from a gentleman named Tetski, and he's asking which parameters do you consider most important for determining protein quality, and is this different for different raw materials?
Dr. Chad Paulk (18:21):
I am currently trying to answer that same question for myself. You know, we probably the most consistent one I've seen from a protein quality standpoint and the processing is KoH solubility. Just giving an indication of if it's over or under process and how soluble that protein is, it is not the end all be all. But it's, you know, some of the papers I've seen, some of the values I've dealt with, it's been the best so far. I've also had projects where I picked up differences in performance, but I can't detect it analytically. I just, I don't know what's going on there. So I don't know if it was a formulation, something else. But yeah, it's you know, lysine and crude protein is something that we utilize as well, but that kind of gets to where you're to the degree of processing where lysine is actually going down. I think where it gets real tricky is when you're kind of on the edge, where it's enough to make a difference, but harder to detect. So it kind of comes back to what JT said: when it's over-processed you can see it. When it's bad, it's when it's just marginal that it's harder to tell that difference. I think that's where our areas to potentially capture more value are.
Scott Sorrell (19:53):
All right. Very well. In the beginning, you mentioned there's kind of two primary or areas of thermal processing. One is, with the incoming ingredients and then two is, is on the farm with pelleting. Is there anything that we, we should cover for the audience relative to incoming ingredients before we transition over to pelleting?
Dr. Chad Paulk (20:14):
No, I think we covered it so far. You know, I think there's a lot of opportunity. Soybean meal is- JT touched on some of that- I think distillers grains and bakery meal, there's some opportunity there to really try to understand how we improve our precision and utilization of those ingredients. And it's a cost balance there of your economic return, too, that makes it a little more difficult.
Scott Sorrell (20:44):
Yep. All right, then, so let's start with pelleting. So let's just start off with the basics. Why do we pellet feeds?
Dr. Chad Paulk (20:51):
JT are y'all currently pelleting? Do you pellet where you are now?
Dr. JT Pope (20:55):
Yeah, so we pellet every bit of feed we make except for feeds for breeders. So and, and like Chad mentioned, it's all-. When I've looked at the economics of pelleting, it makes tons of sense for us to pellet feeds, at least here in the Southeast, it does. We're paying a premium for grains to get here. So it looks like a winning situation on paper. You know, so we've been pelleting feeds as an industry for a very long time. And yeah, so it's just kind of normal for people to pellet. It's actually like the root question of why do we pellet feeds is hardly discussed because it's just kind of taken for granted that we're going to pellet diets.
Dr. Chad Paulk (21:43):
Yeah. We actually see that discussion a lot more on the swine side, and kind of the rule of thumb to build off what JT just said is the higher the ingredient costs, the greater, the value of pelleting. And so on the swine side, you have populations of pigs on the east coast, and then in the Midwest. And in the Midwest, some of those are closer to the corn source and in soybean meal. And so some of your ingredient costs is a little lower, and we actually see more people in the Midwest feed mash diets and not pellets. But more people on the east coast, or just about everybody, I think on the east coast is pelleting. So there's more of a blend of those who pellet or don't pellet in the swine industry where the poultry industry, I think a large percentage pellet. And that's once again, what kind of drove me to the pelleting side, being with the feed science group here at K-State is just, you know, there's so much more. Pelleting is just much more of a common place.
Dr. Zack Lowman (22:45):
How important is pellet quality? Back when I used to work with the ducks, it was super important. And if there were 5% fines, we were having a lot of issues with it. But I know broilers don't, their diets typically aren't like that. Where is the kind of the cutoff that, or is it more just the actual pelleting that's you're seeing the advantages of?
Dr. JT Pope (23:05):
Well, I, I think like Chad mentioned early on, there is some inherent benefit of just going through some type of thermal processing to begin the unfolding process. You know, and there there's literature out there that supports the idea that pelleting to some extent will improve digestibility. The poultry industry is funny because there are companies that preach pellet quality and make these great pellets and go through all these extreme measures to get good pellet quality. And there are other companies that kind of, as long as it went through a pellet mill, they're fine with it. And both of those folks are, you know, large companies that still operate, still make money. So I don't know that it's going to kill you one way or another. I think it's very difficult, I think it's very difficult for us to narrow down the true value of pellet quality and all of the research that's been done with it.
Dr. JT Pope (24:02):
As far as looking at the response in the animals, it's all done in kind of small pen scenarios. But I think pellet quality, you know, the largest importance for pellet quality is when you have a 100 birds, or 50 to 100 birds that are trying to get to one feeder at the very end of the flock. And and it's very difficult for us to figure that out in a university setting. And I haven't seen someone really, really get to the bottom of that in a commercial setting either. So there's a lot for us to learn as far as the way pellet quality can positively impact our business.
Dr. Chad Paulk (24:37):
It's a very dependent situation. I think what we're trying to understand now on the pig side, if the phase of production, like a growing 80 pound pig versus a 280 pound pig. Your pigs, your pig space, or feeder space per pig is different, the how much they eat is different. And trying to understand if that influences the pellet quality response. We've also, you know, through just some discussions in the poultry industry, I don't, I'm not aware of how much like feeder design differs. But in the swine industry, we've kind of seen this evolution of feeder design. And if you go back to some of the old, big green round feeders, you don't really pick up a pellet quality response because the pigs will just push the feed around and they never waste it. And then they end up eating it.
Dr. Chad Paulk (25:31):
Whereas like with some of the modern design feeders, it ends up in the pit. So then that's where your feed efficiency response is coming from. So it's a feed wastage deal. And so it really just is going to depend on the response there. But yeah, you're definitely to, in order to capture that value, you're more likely to do it with a good quality pellet, but it costs money to produce a better quality pellet. If you ramp up your tons per hour, your production rate, you get more feed out the door faster and you still get that improvement in bulk density and feed handling characteristics.
Scott Sorrell (26:11):
I understand that we've been talking a lot about the positives of pelleting feeds, but there are some downsides as well. One of which is that it has the potential for destroying enzymes. And I believe you've done some of your schoolwork in that area. And wondered if you could expound on that just to bit.
Dr. JT Pope (26:29):
Yeah. So, so that's one of the things that interested me in graduate school was looking at how thermal processing does potentially negatively impact enzymes. And it certainly can. I think it depends on how you're processing your feed. Some of the enzymes are much more susceptible to thermal denaturation than others. So I've worked with some enzymes that are rock solid. I think you could just throw them in a pot of boiling water and squeeze them through a die and they'd come out just fine. And we've had others that, that you know, you're not getting much over 180 degrees, and you're starting to denature the enzyme. So I think, you know, from a practical standpoint, it's very important to understand the enzyme that you're feeding, and what its capabilities are as far as surviving the process. There's no doubt though that we can through conditioning or through our die specs or through our formulations, we can definitely impact the ability of an enzyme to survive the pelleting process.
Scott Sorrell (27:36):
So when you say that some survive better than others, youre talking about the specific kind of enzyme, whether it's a phytase, protease- is that what you're talking about?
Dr. JT Pope (27:50):
Yeah, so, so when I was in school, my graduate work. We worked with phytases in NSP systems, specifically a couple of different types. I have not done much work at all with proteases on thermal stability. So I don't know if for some reason they're able to make proteases is more stable than a phytase or and an NSPs. But yeah, we were using commercially available enzymes for all of the work we did.
Scott Sorrell (28:19):
But even within phytases, there was a big range in stability, wasn't there?
Dr. Chad Paulk (28:24):
So we see it, all depends on what kind of, if they have a coating or not. How they're produced, all those different things, it can lead to differences in stabilities, and what I kind of found and JT, I don't know if you agree with this or not, but the interesting thing is when you hit that threshold, it goes pretty fast. And so you, I mean, you can go from a hundred percent stable down to 20% in less than 10 degrees or somewhere around there. I mean, it starts to drop off fairly quick. But yeah, I think there's a wide variety depending on the source.
Dr. JT Pope (29:07):
Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of the same thing that we experienced as well is once you get to the point where that protein is going to start unfolding or the enzyme, especially, you know, cause it needs to stay structurally intact to be active. So once you get to the point where it starts to unfold one of them, it's starting to unfold all of them. You know, and all of it's time and temperature dependent, but once you hit the threshold, there's going to be a drastic decrease in what you recover. Which is kind of scary, you know, from a production standpoint, because all it takes is one of the operators to think, well we'll just run this five or 10 degrees warmer than we normally do. And all of a sudden we have rubber bands. So it's important to understand what these enzymes are able to survive and to make sure that, you know, at the feed mill, we control that environment to make sure that our enzymes are viable when they actually reached the farm.
Scott Sorrell (30:08):
That brings up a good question. Chad, could you maybe from an academic perspective, talk to us about what are the parameters that you recommend for pelleting in terms of time, temperature, moisture, that kind of thing. And then I'll follow up with JT and see what do they find that works best in in practicality?
Dr. Chad Paulk (30:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's an art to it, and figuring out what your- you first have to determine what's your objective? Are you trying to have a balance of throughput, quality, enzyme stability, or are you trying to push one or the other? I think standard, we're typically around the 32nd conditioning retention time trying in a corn soy diet, trying to hit 185 Fahrenheit. And, you know, I think your LD ratio on your dies is going to have a large influence too. I'm guessing most people are around that LD or eight, or at least that's kind of what we use the most. If you have an LD of a 10, so a little on the thicker side, anything less than 8 is more on the thin side. And so it's just trying to find a balance for all those. If you're pelleting diets with, you know, high sugar content, whether it's nursery pig diets or if you add in some bakery or some other kind of product, spray dried product, you might have to back that temperature off. Nursery, pig diets, we're closer to 145, at least on our mill.
Dr. Chad Paulk (31:40):
Some people might try to push out a little hotter, but it just depends. And so, yeah, that's kind of, kind of where I think the common ground is.
Scott Sorrell (31:52):
Yeah. And JT, what are you guys doing there at The house of Raeford in terms of the parameters that you try to set?
Dr. JT Pope (32:01):
Yeah. So we're actually very similar to what Chad mentioned and that's, that's not going to be uncommon. That kind of a cross the industry, I think it all depends on what each individual company puts an emphasis on. As far as pellet quality is concerned, you know, is it a metric that they push with their mill managers? And you know, in those cases, you'll typically see those folks be a little more aggressive with thermal processing. If somebody is trying to get a really good pellet, they're going to have to have a thicker die, they're going to have to run their temperature up some. And and they may even slow their pellet mills down. A lot of guys that are looking for pellet quality may force wheat into their diet as well, to make sure that they can get a good pellet.
Dr. JT Pope (32:43):
So it all depends on what the outcome you want is. That's where I would love to have more data that comes directly off of a large farm, where with a more dynamic situation then we might see in a research pen to really tell the true value of pellet quality because we know that if we kind of push the envelope here to get really good at pellet, we run the chance of destroying some of our nutrients. Not just our enzymes, but also our lysine. We have lots of vitamins that aren't completely stable. So we have to make sure of that. And that's very much the case with House of Raeford. We're not an extremely aggressive pelleter for those reasons. We want to make sure that that all of our nutrients are still intact.
Dr. Zack Lowman (33:27):
So when I do work with pedigree birds, they're really worried about salmonella and other pathogens. And we heat them up really hot. And we've tracked a little bit of how things degrade and are lacking. So we really have to over formulate a lot of our diets just to get into them what we actually need.
Dr. Chad Paulk (33:47):
It kind of comes down to you're really just managing moisture is kind of how I view it. Because if you, if you have higher moisture ingredients, you have to back that temperature off. If you have lower moisture ingredients, you're trying to push more steam, more heat on them to get more moisture in there to give that pellet quality. That's, you know, sometimes if we might have a 30 second retention time, but if we have really dry ingredients or a dry corn or something of that nature, we might try to bump that retention time up to 60 seconds just to get more moisture in there for it as it goes through the die. But just trying to find that balance there, and then yeah your salmonella control, that thermal processing can become a whole different story. Especially if you get into hydronizers and other things like that to really crank up the temperature and time that it's exposed.
Dr. JT Pope (34:46):
Yeah. That's right, and you'll see that with all of your primary genetic companies. They're going to have hydronizers in those facilities. They're also usually using some other type, maybe a formaldehyde based product to clean the feed up to. They go through extreme measures to ensure that they can provide salmonella free tricks. So obviously for us, when we're making a broiler, we'd have to keep our plants clean. And we take salmonella precautions, especially with our breeders. But from a feed processing side, we don't see that as a strong point for us to control salmonella coming into the plants. And, and on the water comment, that brings up a good point, Chad, because there's a lot of people that are well, there's been some work done at NC State with adding water to diets. And it's a question we get all the time in the, in the summer.
Dr. JT Pope (35:39):
You know, our mills are often bringing in dry corn and it's already hot outside. And you know, they're only supposed to go to a certain temperature and the pellet mills just don't want to run very well. I've seen some interesting, some interesting setups to get water into the diet. You know, people will do it at the mixer, and I've even seen people spraying water into conditioners. So there's, it's really interesting the water aspect of it. And there hasn't been a ton of work done on how that's gonna impact proteins through the pelleting process.
Scott Sorrell (36:18):
JT, one of the comments you made earlier in consideration of pelleting was lysine quality. And Chad, I know you've done a lot of work with with looking into that. And the impact that thermal processing has on protein quality. Can you kind of briefly kind of go over some of the research that you've been doing, and then what were some of the key outcomes that you found?
Dr. Chad Paulk (36:41):
So on the lysine availability standpoint, and research, and pelleting, we did it on the swine side. So really what's binding that lysine is it's binding was sugars because now you're having a browning reaction. And we kind of potentially increase that risk over the years by chasing diet costs. You add more free lysine in theree so in theory, that should potentially increase the opportunity for this browning reaction with thermal processing. You add more reducing sugars, if you add byproducts, whether it's distillers grains, or really bakery mill or anything like that. So, you know, in theory, it seems like there's a greater chance for this reaction occurred by this lysine. We did some studies on the swine side. We would push our temperatures hot as we could pelleting. We had 20% distillers, 15% bakery meal, as much free lysine as we could get in the diet and it still be realistic.
Dr. Chad Paulk (37:49):
And we didn't come up with any Maillard reaction, no reduction in lysine availability. We actually improved digestibility through the pelleting process. So on the pig side, anyways, we weren't able to cross that line to get into negative lysine digestibility with the pelleting process. And we, I feel pretty confident in it. We measured it on the digestibility side with the iliel cannulated pigs, and we also do group performance. And it's all similar results there. When you look at some of the work, I can't remember who-. I knew John Boney was involved with it. I think it was at West Virginia, but, you know, they did it on the poultry in a very similar design that they ran. And I think they might've started to pick it up and you put bakery meal in the diet and maybe demonstrated a reduction in lysine digestibility with that high bakery diet. You know, I'm not sure if on the poultry side, if there's more work to be done, if there's anything that JT is seeing in the field, but on the pig side, you know, we didn't, we didn't cross that threshold of reducing digestibility.
Dr. JT Pope (39:10):
And there's, you know, for us looking just in the field and how our birds are performing, things like that. I can't really comment to that. It's difficult to pick something like that. The best place to study something like that is certainly in a university setting. So and especially for us, like I said, we are not really aggressive with our pelleting. So this wouldn't be a place that we would potentially run into those issues I don't think. I have heard stories about integrators out there being too aggressive with pelleting and losing recipe yield. And those types of things that, that we know are lysine dependent processes. So I, you know, anecdotally I've heard that it can happen. I have not personally seen it though.
Scott Sorrell (39:58):
Does it matter whether the lysine is coming from the soybean meal, or whether it's a synthetic source in terms of being impacted by the thermal processing?
Dr. Chad Paulk (40:11):
So I think the short answer is potentially yes. When we think about the browning reaction, it's that free amine group that binds to the sugar. So I'm going to do some speculation here, but my thought is the free lysine, that amine group is probably more available. And you know, probably depending on the protein structure within the protein source, how think that amine group is still available, but I could speculate that it's probably more within that complex. It might be other you know, bonds or some way if it's folded up more protected, not as available to be bound in the browning reactions. So that was kind of our hypothesis going into some of our research is thinking, yeah, that amine group should be more accessible by those sugars to bind. But on the pig side, we weren't able to demonstrate that.
Dr. JT Pope (41:14):
Okay. And I would believe that hypothesis is right on. Because that's exactly how I would feel about it. I mean, what you just, just think about a free lysine floating around out there versus one that has other amino acids folded on it, potentially giving it some more thermal stability or more protection of the amine group before, you know, a digestive enzyme starts to starts to break them apart. It just makes sense that a bunch of liquid lysine or dry lysine going in would be more available for binding.
Dr. Chad Paulk (41:46):
There's also been some classic research with crimps on amino acids and the speed at which they're absorbed versus intact proteins. Or amino acids in intact proteins. And I think that demonstrates that that yeah they're absorbed more rapidly so they they're more available than intact protein.
Scott Sorrell (42:10):
Okay. I got a few questions here from the webinar that's kind of relevant to this discussion. This one comes from Roberto. It says there seems to be a large variety of factors that affect lysine digestion. Is there a commercially feasible way for large mills to keep a check on how they are doing?
Dr. JT Pope (42:30):
I don't think specifically of anything we can monitor on a constant basis that will give us that type of feedback. I mean, the only thing that comes to mind is that if you could build an NIR equation for that and stick it on your finished feed leg, or you know, under, underneath pelleting or underneath cooling. And potentially monitor that as a constant process. But unless you're just going to constantly, just like we would do with an enzyme, look at free lysine before you pellet, free lysine after you pellet. If you were to see a major drop off there, then maybe you're being too aggressive. But I'm sure Chad can speak to this measuring free lysine all the time. It gets to be costly, and it's not something that we do very often at all.
Dr. Chad Paulk (43:19):
No, I don't think we're there yet. Back to that question of digestible lysine. From everything I know, we kind of go, the digestibility coefficient comes from a book value, and then we base things off shifts and analyze values. You know, you might come up with some different prediction equations to make some adjustments. If you think fiber is going to shift your digestibility or something of that nature. But no, I don't think there's a clear answer for that question. And, you know, that's, we've kind of led some of that work we've done on soybean meal is to try to understand if that, if there is a difference between source. Because we know amino acid content changes and we can adjust for that in formulation, but are you still leaving some value on the table because that digestibility changes. And is there, do we need to be considering different coefficients for different sources or not.
Scott Sorrell (44:33):
Melissa is asking what would you say the dietary sugar concentration break point would be that results in reducing the digestible lysine? So I think what she's asking is there, is there a certain amount that causes the reduction in the lysine digestibility?
Dr. Chad Paulk (44:53):
I don't, I don't know if there's, I don't know what that is. And like we kind of said earlier on the chicken side, there might be some more debate or research that needs to be done. On the pig side, I think the sugar content, the ingredient that has the sugars in it are limiting or preventing us from getting to that point. So the more sugar I put in my diet, I have to drop my temperature. So the diet doesn't implode. And so I think just the characteristics of the ingredients aren't allowing us to get to the temperatures to cause that binding. At least on the pig side from the data we have. And so it's kind of this balance. So, you know, sugars are sticky. They, they absorb that moisture at least like your whey ingredients and things like that. So it's kind of a catch 22. It prevents us, you know, we can't pellet a high sugar diet at 185, it's just not going to happen. So I don't know if we can necessarily get to that point to answer that question.
Scott Sorrell (46:08):
All right, I got one more here real quick Ebrahim. Should we also consider the impact of thermal processing on starch geletization and its impact on animal performance?
Dr. JT Pope (46:19):
I think there's been some interesting work done at NC State recently from a master student who's moved on to go to another school, but I don't know what I'm at Liberty to say here. But she, it should be published through the university, but they did a lot of work, looked at a lot of starch gelatinization and pretty much showed that there isn't any, I mean. If they're based on the data I saw, it was zero evidence that starch gelatinization was occurring. And these are in diets with lots of moisture. Actually adding water into the diet and running at very high temperatures. And if you just look at some of the basic old grain cereal literature, I mean, they'll tell you that there's not enough moisture in the pelleting process to really drive starch gelatinization. It requires quite a bit of moisture, and we're nowhere close to that while we're pelleting diets.
Dr. Chad Paulk (47:19):
Yeah. So I agree. The interesting thing is one, when you look at starch digestibility in the bird and the pig, it's already extremely high. I mean, we're talking 96- 98% depending on what data you look at. So even thinking about, okay, if I do gelatinize it, how much more room for improvement is there anyways? That there could be some, but I agree with JT's comment. The work we've done, you know, we see how I'd have to dig the data up, but I think coming out of the conditioner, we had roughly 6% gelatinization, and then once we push it through the dye, it was around that 12% gelatinization. Where if you look at extruded products, they're getting more like 75% gelatinization. So in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small amount. And we actually did a feeding study here where we-. The other thing you have to, when you think about research, anything you're doing to increase gelatinization could also affect other things like pellet quality.
Dr. Chad Paulk (48:24):
So you kind of get these confounded effects going on, too. So teasing out those differences becomes really difficult. We were fortunate enough, we had two different sources of corn that gelatinized different in the pelleting process when we pelleted them exactly the same. So we kept all of our conditions as the same, our pellet quality ended up being the same. And I think one of them ended up with maybe 3%, 4% more gelatinized starch in it. And we didn't pick up any- I mean, we picked up there might've been some minor differences in final body weight or carcass weight, but nothing on the feed efficiency side that I recall.
Scott Sorrell (49:08):
Well, gentlemen, as we kind of move toward closing this out, is there any big topics that we've not covered yet related to thermal processing?
Dr. JT Pope (49:18):
This is a conversation that could go on for a very long time. We've just scratched the surface here. You know, but I think the big takeaway, at least on my part is that it's, if we overprocessed anything it can be bad, and not processing is also bad. So we have to live somewhere in the middle. And unfortunately we don't have great ways to measure either side of that. You know, as far as from a production standpoint, is there something we can measure every single day? And you could potentially correlate some of these things back to PDI. For example, that's some of the things we did when I was in graduate school was we saw that phytase recoveries were very well correlated with our pellet durability index. So with enough work, you might be able to build a data set that could kind of say, hey, you want your pellet durability index to be around this point, but no more. Because we know when we go beyond that point, that's when we start to see that the lysine becomes bound or you're denaturing most of the enzymes out there.
Dr. JT Pope (50:23):
So hanging out somewhere in the middle is not such a bad thing, but I think a lot of that's just because there's a lot more of it that we need to learn, a lot that we don't understand about these processes before you make decisions like that.
Scott Sorrell (50:36):
Hmm. That's a great wrap-up JT. Zach, what would you add? What are some takeaways that that you'd leave with the audience?
Dr. Zack Lowman (50:47):
I think the main takeaway is the incoming ingredients consistency and quality are very important. And the correct time and temperatures are important to protein digestibility as well as vitamin enzyme stability.
Scott Sorrell (51:03):
And Chad will give you the final word here to wrap us up.
Dr. Chad Paulk (51:07):
You know, I think evert production system's different. Whether it's poultry, swine, genetics, a breeder stock, or, you know, broiler production. And then I think the key is to understand your objectives. Understand your ingredients, know your supplier, work with your supplier to wrap your head around this ingredient quality things, and then understand how all of these things influence the pelleting process. And it really just comes a multi-factorial response to understand time, temperature, moisture, and how to wrap it all together to provide a good quality ingredient. And it's not going to be the same in every system. But just being knowledgeable about it and how to adjust things is going to put you in a better place.
Scott Sorrell (51:59):
Yeah. Thank you for that. As JT said, you know, this is a big subject, we've just scratched the surface. And so I'll be looking forward to having you guys back here once again at the Real Science Exchange to kind of dig a little bit deeper sometime in the future. So I want to thank you for that. I also want to thank our loyal listeners for stopping by once again here at the Real Science Exchange. I hope you learned something and I hope you had as much fun as we did. As a reminder, our Real Science Lecture series continues with monthly topics for both the ruminant and mono gastric audiences. Our next webinars will be on December 14th with Brett Stewart, from Global AgriTrends, and he'll share his thoughts on how 2022 will shape up for all of agriculture. To register, visit Balchem.com/RealScience. If you like what you heard tonight, please remember to drop us a five star rating. Don't forget to request a Real Science Exchange, T-Shirt, all you need to do is like or subscribe to the Real Science Exchange, and send us a screenshot along with your address and shirt size to anh.marketing@balchem.com. Hope to see you next time here at the Real Science Exchange, where it's always happy hour, and you're always among friends.