ABSTRACT
Soybeans are refined into three primary products: soybean oil, soy hulls and soybean meal (SBM). The poultry feed industry uses about 50% of the SBM produced in the United States each year. The meal is valuable to the animal feed industry because it remains an excellent source of amino acids that would otherwise be lost to the human food chain after we have removed the oil from the bean. Overall, it is estimated that (either through soybean oil or SBM) over 95% of U.S. soybean production finds its way into animal agriculture. The continued use of SBM in animal feeds depends on the ability of the meal to provide the nutritional components that make it attractive to animal producers, especially as those components are balanced with respect to the anti-nutritional factors that SBM contains. This balance has become increasingly important as price constraints have made SBM to compete with alternative ingredients such as dried distiller’s grains (DDGs), as well as other oilseed meals such as canola, cottonseed or groundnut meals. In addition to these vegetable protein sources, there are a variety of protein sources such as animal by-product meals that can compete with SBM on a limited basis. Also, the amino acid requirements critical to optimal poultry performance can be met increasingly by synthetic sources in certain cases. Depending on the price considerations, it may sometimes become more advantageous to meet the essential amino acid balance of the birds with individual purified amino acids, instead of relying on SBM alone.
