USSEC recently brought Dr. Jannes Doppenberg, swine nutrition expert at Schorthorst Feed Research (SFR), the Netherlands, to Poland to visit with a number of local feed compounders and swine integrators and discuss their feeding programs. From the point of view of the U.S. Soy industry, such personal visits of internationally renowned experts help to build up its relationships with key local nutritionists, which is key to delving deeper into their feed formulations, and encouraging them to share how they formulate feeds and which feedstuffs and nutrient restrictions they use.
At a couple of companies, presentations were shown on the effect of birth weight on technical performance and meat quality, along with the effects of dietary amino acid levels and genetics. In conclusion, weight selection of the starter piglets and split sex feeding will decrease feed costs and improve carcass validation. It was emphasized that higher levels of dietary amino acids will improve carcass quality, especially with genetically superior piglets and boars versus barrows. This will obviously increase the soybean meal usage.
The nutritional discussion at some of the other companies focused on lactating sow feeds. Results were presented on how to increase feed intake by using high quality proteins, meaning an amino acid profile as close to ideal as possible and a high ileal digestibility. This provided the USSEC consultant with the opportunity to mention the higher quality of U.S. Soy.

At one company, the discussion concentrated on comparing technical results from Poland with those in the Netherlands, U.S., and some other leading countries. With a lowest feed conversion ratio (FCR) of 2.6 (up to 3.1 with high slaughter weights), there was a lot of room for improvement. This meant the energy conversion was even worse. The use of an standardized ileal digestibility (SID) amino acid profile and net energy system were discussed in order to improve technical performance and validate the superior quality of U.S. soybean meal. The bi-monthly soybean meal quality by origin report produced by SFR for USSEC, which included shadow pricing for Poland, was shown to the customers.
Also, the expert’s meeting with the largest integration in Poland, ended with a clear conclusion that setting higher levels of SID amino acids in their pig diets would increase the usage of soybean meal slightly increasing the feed cost, but would result in better carcass quality of their finished pigs.