Maintaining ingredient quality for piglet feed
The success of any nutritional strategy starts with the quality of the raw materials. Trouw Nutrition has developed programmes to maximize the quality standards of feed ingredients, focused on two crucial pillars: nutritional value and feed safety.
NutriOpt and our Feed Safety programmes offer tools, services and products to improve ingredient quality and help you use your ingredients in the most efficient and effective way.
How to recognise
Many variables can cause the actual nutritional content of ingredients to fluctuate, including new batches, a change of supplier, different time of harvest, processing variations and natural variability. Farmers and nutritionists typically use standard table values when mixing feed. However, it is often more effective to know the precise quality of feedstuff in the silo at a specific moment, rather than the average values of a certain feedstuff. Precision feeding starts with nutritional management, which requires knowing the nutritional content of the ingredients used. The desktop and mobile solutions provided by NutriOpt, use actionable analysis and insights to offer safe and cost-efficient diets in a fast and accurate way.
Feed and water safety
Threats to feed safety are numerous, encompassing physical, chemical and microbiological risks, which include bacteria, mould, yeast and mycotoxin. Controlling these risks requires an integrated approach involving each part of the feed supply chain. Trouw Nutrition continuously conducts global crop analyses, and out of 20,000 samples analysed in 2018, 46% tested positive for the presence of mycotoxins. Tests of water showed that 26.1% exceeded maximal recommended levels of E. coli (<100 CFU/g). These results indicate a true quality risk. Our Feed Safety Programme offers several tools and services to support the monitoring process (Masterlab and on-site analysis) as well as the application of corrective measures where needed (Selko®, Fysal®, Fylax® and TOXO®).
The impact on the farmer
Accurately estimating the nutritional value of ingredients allows for precision feeding. Knowing what’s in your feed is necessary to avoid unbalanced feed formulation, which can result in potential losses in performance, health and ultimately your profitability.
Feed safety is critical, as, contaminations can lower the nutritional value of your ingredients, putting the animal health’s under pressure and reducing meat quality. Microbiological contamination negatively impacts animal health, performance and efficiency and your profitability. Preserve feed and water and ensure safety by applying corrective measures based on a smart monitoring programme.
