Spelt as Cattle Feed or, Faster Horses, Younger Women, Older Whiskey, More Money

– Steve Boyles, OSU Extension Beef Specialist

After twenty years of using my Ph.D. in nutrition I’m not sure I’m a better livestock nutritionist but I’m definitely becoming an old nutritionist. On my first job at North Dakota State University I had the honor of working with an older nutritionist, Dr. Ladon Johnson. He got his Ph.D. in nutrition from Ohio State a long, long, time before. He told me some interesting nutritionist axioms.

1. You can probably feed 10-20% of any grain, even if you don’t know what it is.

2. Two pounds of alfalfa can get rid of a lot of sins

This past week I had a presentation on feedlot design but one of the questions was how to feed “speltz”. I said, “They feed like oats.” I was then challenged. The comments were they were a digestible fiber, were higher in protein, and higher in fiber.

On my way home I began to wonder if new information was out. Had my knowledge been by-passed? Was there a new way of thinking? It brought to mind and old country song by Tom T Hall entitled: Faster Horse, Younger Women, Older Whiskey, More Money which was about a young person talking to an older person about philosophy. The previous title was the philosophy of the older individual. I once more delved into the literature to see what I could find and it is as follows.

Spelt is often erroneously called “speltz.” Sometimes emmer, another subspecies of wheat that includes durum wheat, is incorrectly called spelt. Spelt (Triticum aestivum var. spelta) is a sub-species of wheat. Most of the nation’s spelt acreage is in Ohio. We grow between 100,000 and 200,000 acres of spelt annually, about 10 times more than any other state. In 1986, The Ohio State University released an improved winter variety, named ‘Champ’.

Spelt has human uses. For example, people who are allergic to wheat can use spelt as an “alternative” pasta.

Here is the nutritional analysis of Spelt and Oats as listed in the 2005 Feed Composition Tables in Beef Magazine developed by Dr. Rod Preston.

1 Reported on a dry matter basis

These numbers look pretty similar to me. The protein content of the Champ variety of spelt is about 11.7%, compared to 12% to 13% for oats. The spelt hull has nearly as much feeding value as the kernel. The counter comment could be that nutritional value of spelt can vary. However the same is true of oats (http://agnr.osu.edu/sites/agnr/files/imce/pdfs/Beef/OatsAsFeedForBeefCattle.pdf). So statements about spelt being higher/lower in nutritional content really depend on individual batches. The hulls of spelt are probably more digestible than hulls of oats but I’m not sure how many “dehulled” spelt or spelt hulls are being fed to livestock.. Without an actual feed analysis, your best guess is that hulled spelt resembles oats and will feed like them.

Oh, in that Faster Horses song the young philosopher came around to the old guy’s way of thinking.