Co-Products from the Steer’s View
Evan Vermeer, Quality Liquid Feeds, Inc.
Beeflinks.com
Co-product is a relatively new term to the cattle feeding industry. This class of feeds includes the products left over from the production of ethanol or other products for human use from corn or other grains. Co-products are breaking on the cattle-feeding scene in the upper Midwest in a big way recently. For many years, the industry has been using corn gluten feed and steep water from ethanol production plants. These are classed as wet mill plants as the corn is soaked before grinding and processing. These plants have the ability to make several edible human products as well as ethanol such as starch, sweetners, oils, etc. The gluten and steep products are very different from the output from dry mill plants. These dry mill plants grind the grain before soaking, hence the name. Dry mill plants are cheaper to build but are geared for strict quality control for the ethanol with everything else produced being the byproducts. These by-products are called co-products and consist of wet distillers grains and CCDS or solubles or syrup.
