Abstract Recent research has challenged our understanding of soybean meal (SBM) value in swine nutrition, revealing higher productive or net energy concentrations and support for productive performance in both the presence and absence of environmental and health challenges. These findings challenge the conventional view of SBM as merely an amino acid source and position it as a critical contributor to both nutrient supply and performance outcomes in swine nutrition and production. Future research must leverage these recent insights to address both challenges and opportunities for SBM across nutrition and health, wean-to-market and breed-to-wean operations, live and meat production. Establishing robust, verified energy values through academic quantification and commercial validation trials will provide the foundation for accurate formulation. Defining optimal inclusion rates that maximize productivity and economic returns across production stages, health challenges, and seasonal conditions will provide actionable guidance for commercial decision-making. Beyond traditional wean-to-market applications, the investigation into the utilization of SBM in breed-to-wean phases is an under-invested area that could yield significant learnings. Understanding how SBM utilization influences reproductive performance and supports sow resilience through health challenges, metabolic stress, and successive reproductive cycles can support evidence-based feeding strategies that enhance both immediate performance and long-term herd productivity. Elucidating the mechanisms by which SBM holistically supports health and resilience under various stressors represents a transformative opportunity to differentiate SBM and elevate system performance. Future research must characterize how SBM's integrated compositional profile – encompassing energy, amino acids, bioactive compounds including isoflavones and saponins, and fiber – influences intestinal and systemic immune function across varying types of stressors, as well as the animals’ immune response to vaccination. Defining these pathways will provide a foundation for prescriptive nutritional interventions that can complement an animal health strategy. Finally, documenting SBM's effects on pork quality attributes, both fresh and packaged, offers a path to align nutrition of the animal with evolving consumer preferences. With an increased emphasis on value-based marketing, demonstrating clear relationships between feeding strategies and end-product characteristics becomes economically significant. Addressing these complex, interconnected challenges will require deployment of a wide spectrum of contemporary biological research tools, including advanced immunological assays, -omics tools and analyses, and others to correlate with live performance and productivity. Additionally, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches offer promising opportunities for hypothesis generation by identifying patterns across large datasets that may not be apparent through traditional analysis, as well as for conceptual hypothesis testing through predictive modeling of nutritional interventions and their biological outcomes before committing to resource-intensive in vivo trials. Addressing these future needs offers opportunities to further increase the value of SBM across the entire chain of modern swine production.
Augspurger et al. (Wed,) studied this question.