Allen Harper Virginia Tech

Publish Date: June 3, 2006

Having waste of any kind implies that there is inefficiency, and wasting feed is a very costly inefficiency. The average feed cost on a swine farm represents approximately 60-70% of the total cost of production. Wasting 5% of feed equates to 3% of an operating budget as lost costs. A farm with an annual operating budget of $100,000 would be losing $3,000 per year to feed waste; the larger the operation, the larger the economic loss. Estimates suggest that between 2%-20% of feed is wasted on swine farms. Table 1 illustrates the cost of feed waste on a per pig basis.

Publish Date: June 3, 2006

In the U.S., supplies of competitively priced corn and soybean meal have been readily available through recent decades, so it is reasonable that these feedstuffs are the predominant ingredients used in swine diet formulation. However, a vast amount of swine feeding research and production experience has demonstrated that nutritional requirements of swine can be met with a variety of feed ingredients including alternative grains and oilseeds, grain milling by-products, food and beverage industry byproducts, animal processing by-products, and others.