Nutritional value of quality protein maize and food corn for starter and growth pigs

Growth traits with starter and grower pigs and a digestion trial were conducted to compare the nutritional value of Quality Protein Maize (QPM), food corn and conventional feed corn. The QPM, food and feed corn contained .45, .31 and .29% lysine, respectively. The growth trials evaluated a QPM-soybean meal diet formulated on a lysine basis (.96% in starter and .7% in grower diets) and four diets arranged in a 2 (food corn vs feed corn) X 2 (low vs high soybean meal) factorial. Soybean meal was either added in the same amount as in the QPM diet or was added to provide the lysine content of the QPM diet. Performance was similar for pigs fed food corn and feed corn in both trials. The QPM diets resulted in greater performance than food and feed corn diets containing the same level of soybean meal supplementation; starter pigs were more (P less than .10) efficient and grower pigs had a higher (P less than .01) rate and efficiency of gain. However, performance of pigs fed the QPM diets was not equal to that of pigs fed isolysinic food and feed corn diets; growth rate was lower (P less than .05) in starter pigs and gain:feed was lower (P less than .05) in grower pigs. Diets in the digestion trial consisted of the corns plus 3.25% casein. Energy digestibility was similar for all diets. Ileal N and amino acid digestibilities were highest for QPM, intermediate for food corn and lowest for feed corn. In most instances, these differences were significant (P less than .05). Apparent biological value was highest (P less than .05) for QPM. These trials indicate that food corn and feed corn have similar nutritional value, and that starter and grower pigs can benefit from the higher protein quality of QPM.