INTERVIEW 52 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE February 2024 "And we’re confident our customers will see how effective our approach is when they start to use these products because the PhytoComplexes we are creating are totally different from traditional phytotechnology; they work by improving an animal’s systems to boost its resilience. The Nutreco Exploration team looks at the weak points in an animal, such as gut integrity or inflammation, and figures out how we can use a PhytoComplex to hit those targets," explains the company team. EXPERT TEAM IN PHYTOTECHNOLOGY The role of Dr. Wall’s team within Nutreco Exploration is to stay close to Nutreco's business lines and its customers to ensure everything the company works on creates value. The company explains that the Nutreco Exploration team only works on projects that fit existing business needs and address specific challenges the company has identified – never on concepts that may be interesting but have no The need to increase global food production has never been more pressing. At the same time, animal production is becoming increasingly complex. The Nutreco Exploration team is finding exciting new ways to fight the challenges that face farmers by harnessing a different kind of complexity – from the plant world. Nutreco’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. David Bravo, explains how Nutreco’s ground-breaking new PhytoComplexes, developed by the team at Nutreco's Garden of the Future in Switzerland, could be the answer. Dr. Bravo says that animal physiology has always been complex. Growth itself is a complex biological process, particularly in farm animals that are selected for quick production. “Farm animals’ diets are finely calculated to precisely satisfy their nutrient requirements and ramp up metabolism for efficient growth. However, their environments also play an important role; farm animals react to even what seem like very small environmental changes, making producers’ jobs much more challenging,” explains Dr. Bravo. NOW IT'S ABOUT HOW WE PRODUCE But today, Nutreco is adding new layers of requirements to the animal production process. “It’s no longer just about producing as much as possible, it’s about HOW we produce,” says Dr. David Bravo. This shift started over 20 years ago with a focus on reducing antibiotic use, and since then we’ve added other constraints around sustainability, carbon footprints, climate change, shifting consumer behaviour, animal welfare, and sustainable ingredients. “These are all very legitimate challenges that are incorporated into new regulations. But the constraints are piling up, and the situation is becoming truly complex, both for our industry and for animals.” SOLVING COMPLEX CHALLENGES WITH NATURAL COMPLEXITY Dr. Bravo talks about how organisations need to respond to complex challenges by dancing with complexity. “The law of requisite complexity states that, in an organisation, only complexity can defeat complexity. But the same principle can be applied to farm animals grown in a modern production context,” he says. “To solve the challenges that face animals and our industry, we need to respond by introducing some natural complexity.” Nutreco’s Phytotechnology program is centred around leveraging the complexity contained within plants to Harnessing nature’s complexity to solve complex challenges in animal production
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