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Spent Grain Trickery

3/7/2014

10 Comments

 
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It's a trap!
I wanted to make a quick post about something I keep seeing popping up on Craigslist: 450 lb barrels of spent grain for $25. If you're not familiar, spent grain, also known as brewer's grain, is the material left over after the starches and sugars in grains are fermented into alcohol. After the starch is removed, protein and fiber are mainly left over--oh, and water. That, we will see, is very important.

So, if you're like me and you see this deal on craigslist, you get temporarily excited. Feed if $400 ton or more, this is just a little over a $100 a ton. I actually called up one of these craigslist guys a few years ago, got all ready to go out and pick up a barrel, then took a second to screw my head back on my shoulders. Here is the issue: let's do a simple comparison of using spent grain as a feed to plain old unspent barley. (Most of the time, spent grain is fermented barley). A quick look at the nutrition charts for spent grain and barley will tell you that spent grain is 26% protein and barley 12% protein. Again, at first glance, this seems like a great deal. Looking a little farther, we get some worse news: spent grain has 11 MJ/kg DM of digestible energy, while barley has 15 MJ/kg DM. That doesn't sound so bad, spent grain is a little lower in energy (i.e calories), but it's so much cheaper. The key is the DM. That means dry matter. Feed nutrition is always reported on dry matter basis, and if we scroll back up, we see that barley is 87% DM and spent grain 25%. Uh oh. When you multiply the energy by the dry matter basis, you see that on a per pound basis, wet spent grain (the way these Craigslist guys are selling it and the way it comes out of the brewery) has 4.7 times less energy than regular old barley. Therefore, you need to feed 4.7 times more spent grain than barley, and the equivalent amount of barley would need to cost $523/ton. Therefore, instead of costing a $111 ton, you really need to think of that spent grain as costing $523/ton. Regular old pig feed is costing about $450/ton picked up at the feed store right now, and it lasts much longer than spent grain, is much more nutrient dense (animals don't have infinite stomach and intestinal space to be able to eat the amount of that bulky feed they would need to equal pig feed or barley), and is a complete ration.

The moral of the story: don't buy those $25 barrels of spent grain. Unless you can get it for free or near free, it's not worth the time.
10 Comments
Carrie
3/7/2014 10:38:22 am

What are your thoughts about it of you could get it free? Would you feed it? We have access to unlimited spent grain along with figs and the excess liquid.

Reply
Jeff
3/8/2014 12:42:29 am

I agree with what Bruce wrote below. When evaluating a feed, you should consider the cost of the feed, the nutrition profile (try to compare it to a commercial mix if possible), the transportation costs of moving that feed, and the labor cost.

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bruce king link
3/7/2014 12:59:41 pm

I did spent grain for 2 years; got it for free from a local brewpub; 30 to 40 33-gallon garbage cans of grain every week. It worked very well for cows; I've raised some nice beef with it, but it was pretty labor intensive to pick up; 20 miles round trip, had to take a trailer, and was loading these 300lb cans by hand truck up and down a ramp.

Oh yea; in order to keep them sweet, I'd pick up the grain on demand, and they had a pretty random brewing schedule.

Eventually decided that although it was pretty good cattle feed, I could do the same job with big round bales of hay for less money, and switched. Don't miss the grind.

Reply
George
3/7/2014 07:01:29 pm

Yep, still know quite a few beef cattle guys who use DDG, dried distillers grain (typically corn). Barley, is brewers grain.

It is not a bad feed supplement, especially if feeding a TMR or chopped silage ration, if you're into feeding lots of grain. Personally I'm a grass fan :)

Reply
Jeff
3/8/2014 12:16:35 am

For the initiated, dried distillers grain has a big advantage (it's dry!) over fresh brewer's grain. It's an ingredient that often gets added to feed rations because it's fairly cheap (it's a waste product, after all).

Reply
Jeff
3/8/2014 03:58:09 am

That was supposed to say, "uninitiated." "For those unaware" would have been better.

Alden
9/6/2015 10:11:32 pm

Do you need to have an #X,000 grinder for the dry grain or can pigs digest it on their own?

Reply
Ashok Wadhawan
11/13/2017 04:55:34 pm

do you wish to vacuum bag and pack spent grain for longer shelf life and stock...if so am in the business of establishing required capacity bagging units to pack from 20-80kg bags ..ashokwadhawan@gmail.com

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Solomon
4/27/2018 06:49:38 pm

Do any of you add the dwg to your compost bin? With what result?

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MckinneyVia link
5/11/2022 05:10:23 am

Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with the kind of stuff you are doing.

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