Managing high ingredient costs to make more cents

In a report journal from Nature Sustainability, it was mentioned that soybean meal is the largest global source of protein in livestock feed and its global production has doubled since 2000. More than half of the world’s soybean production are coming from Brazil and Argentina alone. While livestock population continues to grow by 3-4%, the pressure to produce more protein and energy source in their diet will continue to increase as well. However, several headwinds have caused prices of raw materials to rise to levels that have never been imagined before. In addition to that, there is no certainty until when this predicament will taper off.

Since November 2021, price of soybean meal has started to increase and is still projected to increase as long as the on-going conflict between Ukraine and Russia war is on sight causing supply chain costs to soar all the more.

The recent forecast from Corn price is also following the same trend as we see price started to increase since October 2021. Rabobank’s latest North American Agribusiness review in April also foresee higher raw materials prices with increasing demand, lower planted area and extreme drought situation in US Southern plains. Food security will continue to be the one of the main priorities for each country and agriculture industry is at the heart of it.

With these challenges on increased demand and tight supply of major raw materials, what can the animal producers do to efficiently utilized the nutrients from available raw materials? Novus International has a protease enzyme, CIBENZA DP100 (in some countries, CIBENZA EP150) that improves protein digestibility by at least 2.5% from both animal and plant protein sources. By improving protein digestibility from soybean meal, nutritionists can reduce a minimum of 20kg of soybean meal in the feed formulation without affecting animal performance. CIBENZA DP100 is a unique serine alkaline protease that works exactly where protein digestion happens in the gut. In numerous published articles and peer-reviewed journals, CIBENZA DP100 has consistently shown improvement in animal performance in both swine and poultry species as well as improvement in gut health in terms of improvement in villus height and crypt depth ratio. Based on sample formulations, using CIBENZA DP100 can reduce feed cost by a minimum of $10/ton of feed.

Aside from reducing feed cost, with the use of protease enzyme, there is also flexibility in using alternative raw materials and other by-products like DDGS, rice bran, copra meal (coconut meal) and even feather meal without having the fear of indigestibility for the animal. CIBENZA DP100 effectively works in the undigestible protein portion of raw materials which allows more alternative raw materials or by-products to be used in feed formulation. The undigestible portion of the raw material becomes the substrate where the enzymes can work on. In sample least cost formulation for broiler finisher, it was seen that DDGS can be increased by 2% and can incur additional $13 savings per ton of feed.

With the tight supply of raw materials, now is the best time to maximize the nutrients from available raw materials. Make more cents with CIBENZA DP100.