Nutreco hosted the New Vision on Poultry Nutrition conference in October in Madrid. More than 60 international poultry producers, integrators and compound feed companies gathered for the event to share and discuss the challenges facing the poultry industry.
During the conference, the Nutreco Applications and Solutions Center and its research and development department - together with associated Nutreco companies Trouw Nutrition, Selko Feed Additives and Nutreco MasterLab - presented concrete solutions to a number of these challenges. NutriOpt, a breakthrough science-based, precision-feeding tool, and new products and services from Selko Feed Additives to contribute to the control of salmonella and to footpad health.
Nutrition by the numbers
NutriOpt combines more than years of expertise and innovation from Nutreco in the areas of feed efficiency and application solutions. The nutritional tool integrates knowledge across these fields in such a way that enables customers to optimize both feed costs and production results to maximize financial benefits in their value chain. It consists of a number of key elements that complement and support each other in optimizing animal nutrition, performance, and associated costs through precise real‐time analysis, modelling and calculation.
- NIR & Nutrix: precise calibrated feedstuff analysis, with up-to-date and highly accurate nutritional profiles from Nutreco research centres and labs.
- Animal growth and economics models that make it possible to tailor growth performance to specific operational and/or financial targets.
- Nutritional add‐ons, which plug into the least-cost-formulation system, provide additional intelligence and ease of application for split feeding, enzyme application management, feed structure and other complex challenges.
"Feed costs represent up to 70 percent of the total cost of poultry production. Meanwhile, raw materials are becoming more scarce, prices more volatile, and competition is more intense than ever before. These developments demand for a breakthrough in knowledge and tools for poultry feeding in order to remain competitive and grow your business. The NutriOpt precision feeding tool fulfils the demands, and can bring great value to players throughout the poultry industry," Bert van Gils, Nutreco manager of nutrition technology, said.
NutriOpt has already been launched in Europe, and will be rolled out on a global scale in 2014.
Supporting poultry health
Two issues that the poultry industry deals with on a daily basis are skin health and the possibility of Salmonella contamination. Selko Feed Additives has developed Selko-pH for water application, Fysal-Fit4 for application in feed and analytical services for controlling drinking water quality and Salmonella spreading routes, which reduces the risk of contamination and occurrence of Salmonella in farms.
In the EU, foot pad health is used as an indicator of animal welfare. The special combination of Selko products (Selko-pH, Presan and Optimin) improves digestion and gut health and skin integrity which contributes to improved foot pad health. It is integrated with services, based on diagnosis, flock management, diet specification and feed formulation for fine-tuning dietary recommendations. Together, these control the incidence of moist droppings that cause poor litter quality resulting in improved skin health and animal welfare.
