Today’s consumers are paying more attention to the connection between food and factors such as health, environment and well-being when choosing foods. This natural nutrition trend, which includes concepts such as sustainability, plant-based nutrition, proactive health and functional foods, means consumers are making better choices for themselves and the planet.
The intensification of this trend among consumers with increasing awareness has started to affect all sides of the food production sectors. The livestock sector cannot be independent from this trend. These effects can be both positive and negative. On the positive side, we can say that this trend encourages the raising of animals in a healthy, high quality and environmentally friendly way. Feed produced with more natural and plant-based ingredients improves digestion, immunity, stress tolerance and productivity. But this trend is also driving up costs. This is because the production, processing and distribution of these feeds require more labor, time and resources. This drives up feed prices and reduces the profit margin of animal breeders. Therefore, parties in the animal nutrition industry are focusing on solutions to enhance the positive effects of natural ingredients and animal feed on health and performance, thus offsetting the additional costs with increased productivity.
Along with this trend, there are other factors that are also emerging such as the growing demand for plant-based foods and the resulting reduction in animal food consumption. But this is not our topic today. Suffice it to say that we will focus on this topic in the following issues.
Our main topic in this issue is the effects of natural feed additives on the health and performance of animals. These additives can be derived from a variety of sources such as plant-based substances, plant extracts, essential oils, spices, herbs and microorganisms. And they have positive effects on animal health, performance and product quality. They can reduce the need for human health risks such as antibiotics. So they are sustainable and therefore extremely important.
Today, due to all these positive aspects, many representatives of the animal nutrition sector are working intensively on this subject. You can see some of them in this issue. We hope it will be useful and wish you a pleasant reading…
Hope to see you in the next issue…
