organicfeed

Feed Management Systems (FMS) is now managing the assets of Brilliant Alternatives. In 1999, FMS acquired most of the assets of the Brill Corporation owned by Mr. Bob Brill while issuing a distribution agreement for select international regions to Mr. Brill and his new company, Brilliant Alternatives. In January 2008, Brilliant Alternatives transferred all of its assets to Comco Controls of Canada and FMS extended a new distribution agreement to Comco. An agreement has now been reached for FMS to manage the former Brilliant Alternatives assets and relationships. Bob Brill will be employed as a consultant on a three-year agreement. Former Brilliant Alternative employees Steve Duke and Nicholas Dale have joined FMS as solution specialists, along with a majority of the distributors and consultants around the world. FMS recently announced that Brill Formulation Version 2.0 will be available October 1, 2008, to customers located in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Source:  Feed eNews

Organic feeds improve digestion

The nutritive effects of organic acids, coupled with their feed hygiene effects, make these additives a good choice for incorporation into young animal feed diets.

The controversy over direct-fed antimicrobials has fueled interest in the application of acids for their nutritive and health effects. Digestive disorders in piglets are often caused by the difficulty to adapt to the transition from milk feeding to solid feed. Stress and a low tolerance against pathogens from the feed may lead to bacterial infections of the gut and consequently to an increased incidence of diarrhoea and a low utilisation of feed nutrients.

This situation leads to the need for supporting the digestion of piglets through optimal feed hygiene and the application of suitable feed additives. The use of organic acids and their salts is widely accepted in animal nutrition, although acids differ in their range of effectiveness. On the one hand, they are preservatives and their efficacy in feed and food hygiene has been studied extensively. Apart from an improved feed stability due to their mould-inhibiting and antibacterial properties, acids may also be used as a mineral and energy source in the animal.

It is also known that different organic acids possess performance enhancing properties. Formic, lactic, acetic and their salts, as well as fumaric and citric acid, belong in this category.

Using organic acids in the feed utilizes their antimicrobial properties in the hindgut. This effect is dependent on different factors:

Organic acids are also used to reduce the buffering capacity in the feed. The chemical term buffering capacity (B-value) is used to describe the change in the pH value of a defined volume or mass after the addition of a strong acid. Usually, in the animal feed sector, hydrochloric acid is used for this purpose for physiological reasons.

A more practical definition is that theB- value is the amount of 0,1 N HCl solution which needs to be added to a 10 percent slurry of the feed or a feed ingredients in 100 ml of water in order to obtain a pH-value of 5 (4 or 3). This definition is the reason why we find in practical application different values for the same expression. In Europe, the most common B-value is the method developed by Prohaska and Baron (1980). With the B-value, there exists a neutral measure for the buffering capacity of a ration or a single component, which can be determined in the routine laboratory of the mixed feed manufacturer.

The buffering capacity can provide an indication of the digestibility of an individual feed or a ration in piglet rearing. The higher the value, the more critically the component should be evaluated. Lime and protein sources are especially highly buffering components in the diet. In the formulation of piglet diets, care should be taken to optimize for buffering capacity by reducing protein content and using an optimal amino acid profile.

In pig feeds, a buffering capacity of <700 meq/kg is considered optimal. In practice, the buffering capacity can be lowered very effectively with inorganic acids like phosphoric acid. The zootechnical effects, however, are not equivalent. A low buffering capacity in the feed has a positive effect on gut health and the development of a healthy intestinal mucosa. A healthy mucosa is prerequisite for optimal adsorption of nutrients. This means that one of the parameters that can be positively influenced by the use of feed acids is digestibility.

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