The global swine industry has seen increased feeding of by-products (dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), wheat midds, etc.) initially from 0-10% to the current extremes of 30-60%. These diet cost savings have been a great opportunity for industry to save on feed input costs, but come with a set of challenges as well. The fermentation process to extract ethanol from corn removes almost all of the starch, leaving the resulting DDGS feed by-product containing approximately 40% fiber. This higher fiber content relative to corn results in reduced dry matter digestibility and approximately 10 percentage units less digestibility of most amino acids in DDGS compared to corn (Stein and Shurson, 2009).
Consequently the inclusion of DDGS in livestock diets can have negative impacts on animal growth performance and carcass characteristics. In addition to the negative effects on animal growth and carcass quality, alterations in nutrient digestibility as a result of adding DDGS with a high fiber content have implications for swine manure handling, storage, and decomposition. The commercial swine industry has indicated that manure holding capacity is less in anaerobic deep-pit swine manure storage units, and that the manure from pigs fed high level of DDGS has more solids accumulation, as well as ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide gas emissions.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide Bacillus strains producing enzymes that provide benefits to animals and methods of using these strains.