After all the classroom presentations today we got to tour the Pioneer Livestock Nutrition Center. We couldn’t take photos inside but afterward I interviewed our tour guide, Scott Dennis, Pioneer Technical Services Manager, Forage Additives. Cindy took the photo of me interviewing Scott who is pictured on the left.

Scott says the facility was originally built in 1993 to measure differences in what makes silage more digestible. They do swine digestibility studies, sheep and beef cattle feeding. One of the things they do that you won’t find in a commercial lab is that they grind samples down to a 6 millimeter size instead of 1 millimeter. The grind they use is more closely tied to the size of what the animal is actually chewing and therefore creates more accurate results. They also do 16 tests for every sample instead of 1 and use multiple animals and take an average to get a much more meaningful result. He says you won’t find this in any other University or commercial lab.

Pioneer Forage Media Day Photo Album

You can listen to my interview with Scott below: