Hi there, I'm new to this site and forums in general. My friend just sent me the link to this discussion and it's certainly one of great interest for me as I raise pigs on both whey and sbg. I've been feeding in troughs mixing both the whey, sbg, and other various gleaned feeds together. The pigs are also on rotational pastures and receive between 400-1,000lbs of veggie scraps a day. I have certainly encountered the problem of feeding to heavy a percentage of sbg. I think we're about a 50% mix right now and luckily before we reduced our sbg feeding percentage we only had one prolapsed rectum and caught it soon enough to save the pig. So I very much agree with Walter that no more than 50% of their diet should be sbg less if you've got more to mix it with. The vets I talked to here also suggested hydration might have been an issue, this did happen during one of our 100+ degree spells.
I am currently getting the sbg in 55 gallon barrels and have been experimenting with adding different liquids directly into the barrel to ferment the grains. I've used molasses, malted water aka beer, whey, and straight water. I'm not sure which would really provide the best nutritional enhancement to the feed but I have found that the malted water mixed with some molasses and poured into the 55 gallon drums then roughly mixed seems to provide a much greater longevity to the spent grain. This may be to the sugar content of the molasses I'm not really sure, I'm no scientist just a curious farmer. I would be curious though if there are any places I could provide a sample to for analysis.
I can also attest to the leftovers turning into amazing compost with some green waste or even just funky straw/hay.
And if anyone is interested I have looked into and there have been a few field tests but there is no GMO barley in production right now.
