Creamino® (GAA) can support nutritionists facing the current feed shortages in livestock production

The current global crises pose several different challenges to nutritionists all over the world. Many feed components are increasingly scarce. Due to the manifold recent interferences, this shortage unfortunately affects both, raw components such as wheat, corn or even soybean and sunflower meal as well as synthetic nutrients and additives. This results in enormous economic pressure on feed formulators to maintain utmost cost efficiency of their feeds while keeping good performance.

To do so, several measures in feed production and formulation are crucial. These involve crude component quality and evaluation, processing and targeted use of innovative additives to reach utmost efficiency in the system of animal production.

Firstly, it is necessary to formulate the diets as precisely as possible to meet the requirements of the animals in order to maintain best performance while minimising any dietary oversupply. Precisely knowing the proximate composition of the used materials and the requirements of the animals in the respective production phase is imperative. Frequent analysis of incoming plant components is therefore more important than ever. Multi-phase feeding to meet the age dependent requirements is a necessity and not only state of the art animal nutrition anymore. Knowing the nutrient composition of the specific batch of e.g. maize in the silo allows the nutritionist to reduce the surplus of any nutrient to its minimum and e.g. meet the required SID amino acid pattern with minimum addition of currently expensive and scarce synthetic amino acids.

Secondly, as some components are simply not available at the moment, one might need to switch to alternative sources such as (local) by-products. Here again it is crucial to know their nutrient composition as well as contents of anti-nutritional factors (ANF) and other limiting parameters to effectively include them in the diets.

Thirdly, to maximise feed efficiency, optimising palatability and feed structure needs to be considered. This includes measurements like grinding the grains for best particle size, adjusting the pellet size to the respective growth phase, general pellet quality etc. Here, of course, the current sky-rocketing energy costs might interfere and feed manufacturers need to balance out energy input with feed palatability.

The fourth measure generally involves feed additives. Obviously, nutrients like vitamins should not be spared and need to be included to the diets to maintain health and wellbeing of the animals. Also, in case of hygiene problems in some products like organic acids or mycotoxin binders can at least avoid massive performance drops as there probably is no sufficiently good alternative for the contaminated component available at the moment.

Enhancing the digestibility of the diets is a fifth point to look into. The obvious choice in this regard are additives that generally improve the nutrient availability by breaking up indigestible substances in the plant material like phytate (phytases), complex non-starch-polysaccharide structures (carbohydrases), improving fat-digestibility (emulsifiers), and supporting protein digestion (proteases). These products often have a primary effect like increasing the availability of Phosphorus in the case of phytases. They also can have secondary effects like making “caged” nutrients available, e.g. phytate-bound amino acids or minerals, generating pre-biotic like substances in the case of carbohydrases, improving processability, and generally increasing the availability of dietary energy of plant components or fats. It is crucial to consider all these effects of those additives to maximise the feed utilisation by the animals. However, the extent of possible combination of these products is not completely understood. Therefore the recommendations of the suppliers need to be followed carefully.

Using synthetic amino acids the SID amino acid profile of the diets can be adjusted in a very sophisticated manner and the need for usually imported and very cost intensive protein sources (soy, sunflower, rapeseed, etc.) can be reduced. They enable the nutritionist to adjust the amino acid profile of the diet (taking all of the above mentioned factors into account) to the ideal protein needed for the respective growth phase.

One innovative additive that can be combined with all of the above described measures is Guanidinoacetic Acid (GAA) the active compound of Creamino®. GAA’s only known metabolic fate is the synthesis of Creatine. Creatine is an essential component in the cellular energy metabolism and is responsible for intra-cellular transport of high energy phosphates especially in cells with high and volatile energy demand, like muscle cells. This way, it re-fuels ATP by regenerating it from ADP, supports mitochondrial (energy) and ribosomal (protein) activity and transports energy to where it is needed in the cell. Due to its unique metabolic pathway, GAA enables the animals to reach optimal Creatine levels and increases the Creatine contents of broiler breast muscle by up to 20% compared to non-supplemented animals. By optimising the Creatine levels the energy efficiency of the cell and the organism in general is improved.
GAA can be endogenously synthesised from the amino acids Arginine (Arg) and Glycine (Gly) and is subsequently methylated to Creatine. Through supplementation of GAA, this endogenous synthesis is down regulated and the initially needed amino acids can be used for other purposes. This way, GAA can spare up to 149% of its weight in Arg.

Creamino® contains > 96% GAA thereby delivering all these effects of GAA and Creatine that can support nutritionists coping with the current situation. Using the up to 149% Arg-sparing effect helps to either reduce contents of supplemental synthetic Arg, supports general crude protein reduction, and can help with the scarcity of contents with high Arg levels like sunflower meal. The enhanced cellular energy efficiency enables a nutritionist to reduce dietary energy by 50 kcal to 100 kcal AMEn/kg diet by reducing the inclusion of components like oil or fat or even completely re-formulating the diet to adjust inclusion of scarce products like maize or wheat if necessary. Lastly, it has been shown that using Creamino® “on top” consistently reduces the FCR by 3-5 points in broilers beyond other strategies. So, for integrated productions the amount of feed needed per kg final product can be reduced, another possibly crucial contribution of Creamino®. It is possible to combine these effects as well to e.g. reduce some of the supplemented amounts of synthetic Arg while still reducing FCR to a somewhat lower extent. The recommended dose of Creamino® for broilers is 600 g/t of feed.

Since all these effects are achieved by GAA’s activity within the cells, the nutritive effects of GAA are completely additive to all the other additives. Therefore, Creamino® is a valuable tool for every nutritionist to cope with the current threats of the feed market and maintain productive performance of the birds.

Patented by Alzchem, Creamino® is approved in over 60 countries for poultry and other species. Creamino® is produced in Germany under the highest safety and environmental standards in totally backwards integrated production facilities. This allows us to control quality throughout all stages and guarantee secure supply chains.