Many of us remember when chicken nuggets were first introduced. The poultry industry needed a way to market the parts of the chicken that were in less demand. Kids and adults didn’t care that there was not a part of the chicken called a “nugget”. Just disguise chicken pieces/parts with breading, have a dipping sauce and great volumes sold at value-added prices. It was a marketing triumph!
We have had a similar situation in the beef industry for decades. The animal feed industry is expected to use the pieces/parts of the food/feed industry. The food/feed industry gets all the value it can and then sees if the beef industry can extract the last bit of value before the compost pit or landfill. The system works well. Cattle get reasonably priced feed and the processing industry gets an income stream. The food/feed processing industry has learned how to market their pieces/parts by labeling them byproducts/co-products. To their credit, they have sponsored millions of dollars of research to establish feeding values.
Corn can be fed whole, rolled, ground, flaked or as fermented high moisture corn. Now we have a grain processing industry dedicated to extracting all the energy economically possible from corn for ethanol. The beef industry feeds the co-products at competitive prices (we hope). Some co-products are wet distillers grains, dried distillers grains (DDGs), dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), modified distillers grains (mDDGs) and distillers solubles. The names and analysis change depending upon the processing plant and the methods used. DDGs are not the same from plant to plant or day to day.
These co-products change from processing plant to processing plant depending upon the grain source and the post fermentation processes. Some plants are extracting some/most of the fat from the DDGs. This lowers the energy value a great deal. Some plants are trying to remove the corn fiber from the DDGs for further fermentation. Again this changes the value of the co-product.
The co-products are priced to get them away from processing plants storage so that the more valuable ethanol can continue to be produced. We need to know the analysis of what we are buying especially moisture levels before we jump at perceived bargains.
Beef animals can consume and perform well on pieces/parts of food/feed that are not acceptable to humans/pigs/chickens. We just need to be sure we do not pay too much.