On the Development of Online Tools to Support the Production of Sustainable Animal Feeds

Animal production relies on the supply of nutritious feeds supporting high growth, welfare and health of animals and the production of high-quality products in an environmentally sustainable and profitable manner. With feed cost representing 50 to 80% of the total production cost, feed manufacturers have a very important role in the overall economic viability of animal agriculture enterprises. Animal production involves a complex “nutritional supply chain”, that includes the production and procurement of a large variety of feed ingredients, the formulation and manufacturing of different feeds and the feeding of these feeds to different animal populations (Figure 1). Tracking this nutritional supply chain is regarded as increasingly important and feed manufacturers obviously play a vital role in this process.

Variations in feed quality due to variation in the quality of ingredients can have profound impacts on the performance of animals, the quality and safety of the final products, the amount of waste outputs and the associated potential environmental impacts and the profitability of agricultural enterprises. Variations in feed quality may be attributable to variations in the quality of the feed ingredients or due to issues encountered during the manufacturing and handling of the finished feeds. Feed manufacturers need to be able to ensure traceability of their products and be able to trace back problems to their source. The strong and growing emphasis by food distributors and consumers place on product safety and traceability, animal welfare and environmental sustainability makes it important to ensure that feed manufacturers track many different metrics related to the feed ingredients they source, the feeds they produce and the animal populations consuming these feeds. In parallel, the high price of agricultural commodities and the slim profit margins achieved on most animal agriculture enterprises and the important competition that exists between feed manufacturers in many sectors result in a need to keep feed cost competitive. Feeds need to be formulated to nutritional specifications that are not excessive but that result in high performance, health and well-being of the animals and enable producers (clients) to make a profit. This is not an easy feat given the great diversity of conditions and market demands encountered in animal production. Sustained interactions with industry stakeholders worldwide suggest that many are relying on relatively static, potentially outdated, information on the nutritive value of ingredients, the nutritional requirements of animals and may have limited insights on how to optimize nutritional specifications for specific production conditions.

Animal feed manufacturers rely on an array of tools to support the production of cost-effective feeds of stable and appropriate quality and track the nutritional supply chain. These range from standalone least-cost cost feed formulation programs to paper forms to a wide array of spreadsheets and reporting or accounting programs. Years of working with animal feed manufacturers globally indicate that many feed manufacturers are relying on idiosyncratic processes that are tedious to integrate and prone to error. Many of the tools may not adequately address the multitude of needs of the animal feed manufacturers. A growing number of online resources and cloud-based programs have been developed and maintained as part by public or commercial endeavors. Many of these resources are free or highly affordable and could help feed manufacturers of any size address several of their needs, including:

1) Better prediction of the nutritive value of ingredients

2) Estimation of optimal nutritional specifications for different species, genetics, life stages production environment and market demands

3) Dynamic adjustment of feed formulations to changing raw material prices and characteristics

4) Improvement of Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA&QC) and feed traceability

5) Implementation of effective feedback loop enabling continuous improvement of feed quality

This paper aims to provide a brief, thematic and non-comprehensive review of some of resources and programs available to feed manufacturers.

Figure 1. Animal production, such as aquaculture, rely on a complex nutritional supply chain.

Feed formulation relies on meeting the nutritional requirements of animals using a variety of feed ingredients. Nutritionists need access to detailed and accurate information on the nutritional composition of feed ingredients in order to formulate feed that meet the nutritional requirements of the animals and the targeted nutritional specifications and other important characteristics (e.g. pellatability, palatability, sustainability, etc.) of the feeds.

There is an increasing variety of feed ingredients available to feed manufacturers. Many ingredients come in various declinations (e.g. origin, crude protein content, etc.). There is a large collective body of analytical work and research efforts on feed ingredients generated each year by different organizations. Compiling, analyzing, summarizing and making this information available to potential users has been the focus of a limited number of efforts.

Feedipedia (https://www.feedipedia.org/) is amongst the most comprehensive of those efforts. It is a joint project of the Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (INRAE), the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) and the Association Française de Zootechnie (AFZ) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The main objective of Feedipedia is to provide animal agriculture industry stakeholders with scientific information on the origin, characteristics and chemical composition of a multitude of conventional and unconventional feed resources. It is an open access online resources that provides information for nearly 1400 feed resources. The emphasis is on emerging countries where animal production is intensifying and information on the nutritive value of local feed resources is important.

The INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ feed tables (https://www.feedtables.com/) are important complementary resources to Feedipedia. These feed tables contain data on the chemical and nutritional composition of more than 300 feed ingredients and mineral supplements. Data are made available in the form of tables, on as fed (as is) and dry matter basis, and include statistics of the reported variability for these ingredients. The INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ feed tables are populated with data from chemical analyses performed by a number of laboratories using standard methods and then adjusted to standardized chemical profiles. Nutritional value of the feed ingredients is computed using equations derived from in vivo trials with different livestock species. The feed tables also provide environmental impact values that originate from the ECO-ALIM project (https://www6.inrae.fr/ecoalim_eng/Project). Efforts are currently invested in making the data available in the INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ feed tables more dynamic using RM-Link, a software developed by A-Systems (https://www.a-systems.fr).

The aquaculture industry is one of the fastest food production industries globally. This industry is supported by a multitude of feed manufacturers with very different scientific and technical capabilities. The large of number (500+) of species cultivated, the diversity of the production systems and conditions encountered, the very large number of feed ingredients used and the advanced manufacturing techniques utilized are factors that make the production of successful aquaculture feed especially challenging.

The International Aquaculture Feed Formulation Database (IAFFD) (http://iaffd.com) is a free online resource that was developed and supported by an informal partnership that included the University of Guelph’s Fish Nutrition Research Laboratory (UG-FNRL), the United States Soybean Export Council (USSEC), Wittaya Aqua International (http://wittaya-aqua.ca), MITACS and a few other organizations.

The IAFFD is a “Made in Canada” success story deserving some attention. It addresses challenges that aquaculture feed manufacturers are facing in an innovative and comprehensive manner via two major modules: the Feed Ingredient Composition Database (FICD) and the Aquaculture Species Nutritional Specifications Database (ASNS).

The FICD is comparable to other feed tables presented above but differentiates itself by the very large number of ingredients (650+) and the many nutrients and nutritional specifications (230+) it covers. The focus is on ingredients used in aquaculture feeds. As such it includes many ingredients of marine origins (e.g. fish meals, fish oils, etc.) and several novel ingredients (e.g. insect meals, algal biomass, fermentation products, etc.) without overlooking all the important agricultural commodities, such grains and oilseeds and their by-products, processed animal proteins, amino acid, vitamin and mineral supplements, feed additives, etc.

The ASNS contains nutritional specifications for over 30 commercially important aquaculture species. Defining optimal nutritional specifications for aquaculture feed is especially challenging given the large number of species cultivated (500+), wide variety of culture environment (freshwater, marine, brackish) and production systems (ponds, tanks, net-pens) used, degree of intensiveness (semi-intensive, intensive, super-intensive) of production, feed types (pelleted vs. extruded, regular vs. high energy feeds) and wide difference in socio-economical background of aquaculture producers (e.g. small-scale farmers with very modest means vs. large integrated multinational corporations).

The ASNS provides complete sets of nutritional specifications for commercial species at different life stages (or liveweight ranges) reared under different production conditions. The nutritional specifications are obtained from a series of nutritional models developed at the University of Guelph over the past three (3) decades that are calibrated for the different species, feed types and production conditions. These nutritional specifications are theoretical values. However, efforts are made to compare and adjust these theoretical model predictions against commercially relevant benchmarks and the results from controlled trials.

The IAFFD was originally developed in 2014 as the Asian Aquaculture Feed Formulation Database (AAFFD). It was the first standardized database of nutritional information for aquaculture species. Interest in this resource grew rapidly and a more international outlook was adopted in 2016. As opposed to many online resources, the IAFFD is a relatively long-lived (7+ years) effort and it is continuously updated and improved. Updates are released approximately every six months. Version 7.1 was recently released and version 8.0 will be available in September 2022.

The IAFFD was developed in close collaboration with Adifo BestMix (Adifo.com). Efforts were invested in ensuring the data is available in a format that is highly compatible with popular least-cost feed formulation software (e.g. BestMix 4, WebAllix, Brill, Format, etc.). The IAFFD is made available under a Creative Common (CC) license and users can download, use, modify and share the data as they wish.

Both the FICD and ASNS have proven very useful to aquaculture feed manufacturers around the world. A survey carried out by USSEC indicated that 70% of the aquaculture feed manufacturers in Latin America made regular use of the IAFFD databases. Several feed manufacturers in Southeast Asia have adopted the FICD and ASNS as their reference databases for formulations of their feeds. The IAFFD met significant needs of the aquaculture feed manufacturers in those two regions. Some feed manufacturers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have also adopted the IAFFD as their reference database.

The IAFFD has also emerged as a crucial tool for different educational and training activities. Over the past eight (8) years, USSEC organized over 40 feed formulation short courses with participant from around the world and all these short courses relied on the use of the IAFFD. The IAFFD has also been used for teaching activities at the University of Guelph and elsewhere.

The IAFFD may be highly relevant for other animal feed manufacturers, notably petfood manufacturers. There are several commonalities between the aquaculture feed and the petfood industries in terms of feed ingredients used (e.g. processed animal proteins), nutrients of interest (e.g. taurine, DHA, etc.) and feed manufacturing techniques (e.g. extrusion). Consequently, the FICD could potentially be expanded to accommodate the needs of the petfood industry. Efforts could also be invested to making the IAFFD better adapted to the needs and interests of terrestrial livestock feed manufacturers.

Feed manufacturers invest considerable efforts in analyzing raw materials and finished feeds as part of their Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) program. These programs typically generate an inordinate amount of data using tedious and idiosyncratic collection of data (record sheets, spreadsheets, etc.). These data are most often underutilized because of the limited capacity to collate, analyze and use the data in a meaningful and timely fashion.

Sustained interactions with feed industry stakeholders worldwide suggest that many are relying on relatively static, potentially outdated, and error-prone information about the chemical composition and nutritive value of feed ingredients. Nutrition and QA/QC teams also often spend several hours or even days tracking information about feed ingredients and feed quality in preparation for monthly or quarterly management meetings. Large feed manufacturers can afford tailor-made ERP systems that can enable tracking of this kind of information. However, for many medium and small-size manufacturers, such systems are overly expensive and complicated. Many feed manufacturers need flexible, user-friendly and affordable solutions.

Innovative platforms addressing this challenge are now available to feed manufacturers of any size. These include BESTMIX® Quality Control (https://www.adifo.com/en/brands/bestmixquality-control), KAllix from A-Systems (https://www.a-systems.fr/index.php/en/softwareen/quality-security) and the Raw Material Map (RMM) which is part of the AquaOp Feed platform offered by Wittaya Aqua (https://wittaya-aqua.ca/feed.html). These solutions can help streamline the QA/QC data collection and handling processes. They allow feed manufacturers to save time, avoid errors, update feed ingredient composition databases used in the feed formulation software on a more regular basis, improve the monitoring and benchmarking of the quality of raw materials sourced from different suppliers and support decisions made by the nutrition and QA/QC teams.

AquaOp Feed’s Raw Material Mapping (RMM) Tool is being developed using a cloud-based approach. The advantage of using this type of approach is that there is no redundant or inconsistent data and users can dynamically change and edit data without any back-and-forth communication between different users or providers of information anywhere and instant synchronization of data between users around the world.

While there is no doubt that the analyses carried out as part of QA/QC programs are of crucial importance to ensuring stable quality, the ultimate measure of quality is in the performances of the animals fed these feeds. Many of the tests and measurements carried out as part of QA/QC programs are surrogates for true measures of the nutritive value of ingredients and feeds. For example, crude protein is not an indication of the true protein content of an ingredient. Nutrient analyses, such as amino acid analysis, does not provide any information about the digestibility and bioavailability of the nutrients.

There would be great value for feed manufacturers in effectively linking animal performance with information about the formulation and chemical composition of their feeds. Feed manufacturers cannot manage and afford to test every batch of raw materials and finished feeds through controlled laboratory or pilot-scale growth trials. Consequently, they are highly dependent on monitoring of performance of their feeds under commercial conditions at their clients’ operations. However, obtaining accurate and detailed information about animal performance from clients can be challenging as it is often difficult to share information. In addition, farm performance are affected by a multitude of factors and it difficult to attribute effects to the feeds or to other factors.

Adoption by feed manufacturers and animal agriculture enterprises of systems enabling the efficient capture, compilation, integration and vetting of data would be an important step towards establishing an appropriate linkage between feed formulation and composition information and commercial field performance. Integrating information from the entire nutrition supply chain could help better characterize the effects of various factors (e.g. ingredient quality, nutritional specifications, physical characteristics of the feeds, etc.) on different production parameters under field conditions and potentially enable fine-tuning of feed formulation and composition to improve sustainability and profitability of the sector.

Wittaya Aqua is a Canadian-based software and service company that endeavors to support global aquaculture with industry leading tools, knowledge, and solutions to empower people to make informed decisions and improve the provision of nutritious food in an environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable way. The company is developing and commercializing AquaOp Farm and AquaOp Feed, two software platforms that are uniquely integrated to create a robust feedback loop between field performance on commercial aquaculture operations and feed ingredient composition and nutritional characteristics of the feed (Figure 2).

These two platforms are powered by a series of proprietary, cutting-edge hybrid knowledge and data-driven mathematical models. These models enable the AquaOp Farm and AquaOp Feed platforms to provide true predictive and prescriptive analytics, not simply descriptive analytics. The platforms are designed to foster confidential, seamless and non-interfering cross-cooperation amongst stakeholders (aquaculture producers, feed manufacturers, hatcheries/breeders, processing plants, etc.). Moreover, the platforms can also be used as objective reporting tools to third parties such as regulatory agencies, certification bodies, financial institutions, and insurance brokers.

Figure 2. The development of a digital ecosystem linking feed composition and performance achieved on aquaculture operations.

The production of animal feeds is a complex process that relies in large part on having detailed and accurate information about the composition of feed ingredients, defining optimal nutritional specifications, adjusting feed formulations to changing market conditions, tracking a complex nutritional supply chain and monitoring performance of animals under commercial conditions.

Several online resources and programs have been developed and are accessible to feed manufacturers. The sustained development and implementation robust systems capable of tracking the nutritional supply chain and linking animal performance on farms and environmental impacts to feed formulation and composition could be a highly effective solution to improving the production efficiency and ultimately, the environmental and economic sustainability of animal productions.