11/1/06 Getting More From Corn

Getting more from corn. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. There are about 40 faculty and staff members at the University of Illinois working on biofuels. Larry Berger is an animal scientist. He's been testing ways to make cornstalks compliment distillers dried grain as a feedstuff for cattle. DDG's are a byproduct of the corn to ethanol process. BERGER: We're doing experiments right now where we're feeding up to 40% of the diet as distillers grains and it works very well. In fact in some of our initial experiments we're using distillers grain and soybean hulls together. We're able to replace corn and get almost equal performance. So with the combination of cornstalks and distillers we don't think we can go&we won't be able to achieve performance equal to corn but our goal is to come up with a mixture that will give us say 80% of the performance of corn. That's the point at which Berger believes it becomes economically feasible to harvest the corn stalk to blend with DDG's as a cattle feed. The trick - Berger says - is getting the corn and the stalk harvested separately - and to make the stalk palatable and digestible. BERGER: We're looking at harvesting some of the stalks before the plant is totally dried down. So we're actually handling it more like silage. We're also looking at harvesting the dry stalk after the corn is totally dried down and grinding, treating and pelleting that to make a product similar sort of corn replacement product. So we're looking at different approaches. Each has potential advantages as far as how the farmer utilizes it. The green forage - according to Berger - is more digestible than the dry product. He's hoping to increase the usefulness of both to about 70-percent. The dry product is generally 50-percent digestible by a ruminant - the green 60-percent. Berger says this can be accomplished by treating the forage with an enzyme. BERGER: Innoculant with an enzyme in it is one of the things we're looking at. We're also looking at what's called alkaline peroxide treatment. It's a combination of sodium hydroxide and alkaline peroxide which we developed here that show real potential for improving the digestibility and this material would be sprayed on the forage as you put it into a silo or silo bag and so it would treat and react with the forage over time. And then you would mix it with the distillers grains once you took it out of the silo bag or bunker silo. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.