Glycerol, a Low Cost Energy Source

Feed is the main driving cost of livestock operations. Nutritionist are doing major efforts to optimize feed costs while keeping animal welfare and performance.

Due to the thigh feed costs from traditional raw materials, nutritionists are always looking for new alternatives from co-products of the agro-industry. One very relevant co-product was glycerol. Vegetable oil is split into fatty acids as diesel precursor and glycerol.

The growing demand of crops for plant derived oil diesel is yielding an increasing offer of glycerol. This increasing offer, it is making this ingredient affordable to the livestock industry.

Many studies have validated the suitability of glycerol on animal diets. Donkin et al., 2009 concluded that glycerol is suitable to replace corn silage in lactating cow diets up to a 15% DM without any adverse effect on milk yield, feed intake or milk composition. With regards to fattening Holstein bulls, Mach et al., 2009 found that glycerol was a suitable energy substitute of cereals up to a 12% of concentrated diets without any adverse effect on performance or carcass characteristics.

As well, on other animal species, glycerol has been successfully tested: lambs (Gunn et al., 2010), rabbits (Iñigo et al., 2011), broilers (Simon et al., 1996), layers (Yalçin et al., 2010), swine (Schieck et al., 2010).

In order to facilitate the storage and handling of glycerol, Norel has developed Glycerol52, a solid powder form of Glycerol.