ISSUE FOCUS FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE January 2025 31 and trends in the animal nutrition and feed industry. However, it faces numerous challenges and is undergoing rapid transformation driven by scientific innovation, regulatory changes, and market dynamics. This article delves into the key challenges and emerging trends shaping the animal nutrition and feed industry. CHALLENGES 1. Resource scarcity and rising costs: One of the most significant challenges is the rising cost of raw materials. Ingredients such as corn, soybeans, and fishmeal, which form the bulk of animal feed, are subject to price volatility due to factors like climate change, geopolitical tensions, and increasing competition for these resources from human food and biofuel industries. Water scarcity and land degradation further exacerbate the issue, limiting the availability of resources necessary for feed crop production. Additionally, the environmental impact of over-reliance on certain feed ingredients, such as deforestation linked to soybean farming, presents sustainability challenges. 2. Balancing nutrition with affordability: Balancing optimal nutrition with affordability is a perennial challenge. Producers aim to maximize livestock performance while controlling feed costs, as feed typically represents the largest expenditure in livestock production, accounting for up to 70% of total costs. Achieving this balance requires precise formulation and the integration of cost-effective, high-quality feed ingredients. This issue can be further sub-divided into: 2a. Variability in the nutritional content of feed ingredients: In order to reduce the environmental impact of feed ingredients as well as to counter the volatility of common feed ingredients, much progress has been made in understanding the functionality and utility of alternative ingredients, particularly the use of by-products from different agricultural produce and processes. For e.g. corn and soy are the go-to ingredients for energy and protein in animal feeds. However, other non-conventional ingredients like sorghum, wheat, corn gluten meal, canola meal, dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), food waste, insects etc. are gaining popularity. While these ingredients may have nutritionally similar profile, the variability in nutrient content may be higher due to differences in processing parameters from where they are collected. This leads to variability in animal performance, which affects the economics of food animal industry. A way to cope with this variability is to use the alternative ingredients at lower inclusion levels. 2b. Anti-nutritional factors: Anti-nutritional factors (ANF) are plant bioactive compounds with no nutritive value5, but are crucial for plants to protect themselves from insects, diseases, herbivores, and unfavorable conditions6. The ANFs have a deleterious effect on the nutrient digestibility, leading to depressed Representative image of feeds
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