Our top performing story on social media last month was the report about Lesaffre’s animal nutrition business unit, Phileo, launching a high protein yeast extract product at Aqua 2018 in Montpellier at the end of August.
The Lille, France headquartered company said ProSaf is aimed at improving protein digestibility, feed intake and growth performance in low-fishmeal shrimp and fish diets, rather than 1 to 1 replacement of fishmeal in the diet.
Free amino acids, glutamic acid and nucleotides from yeast cell content increases shrimp feed attractability and palatability, when those small soluble molecules are released into the water, the product also improves primary defenses in shrimp through increasing the total hemocyte count and phenoloxidase activity, said the company
The pressure to reduce fishmeal usage in aqua feeds is one of the limiting factors for growth in the aquaculture industry, but there are technical challenges associated with low fish-meal diets, said Otavio Serino Castro, global species manager/aquaculture, Phileo Lesaffre.
He told us that inclusion rates with ProSaf range from 0.5 to 2.5% of the complete shrimp feed, making it cost effective: “This is one point of differentiation for us.”
Another winner on social media last month was a story about a study undertaken by an international team of researchers from Mexico, Australia and Iran examining the use of commercial and indigenous probiotics in shrimp production.
The group tracked probiotic efficacy and influence on shrimp growth performance, resistance to stressors and immuno-physiological variables to assess the merits of indigenous or commercially generated probiotic supplements.
“As there is no data available, therefore, this study was aimed to investigate the influence of commercial and indigenous probiotic sources of these two mentioned Bacillus species on the growth performance, immunophysiological variables, and stress tolerance in white shrimp, L. vannamei,” the researchers said.
The researchers found that growth and feed parameters were influenced by all four probiotic strains – commercial or indigenous – when compared to shrimp on the control diet. However, results for some factors including growth, final weight and response to stressors were best for shrimp getting the commercial probiotics.
The team concluded:
“Results of this work clearly show that application of two Bacillus bacteria, B. subtilis and B. lichenformis as the commercial products provided a superior efficacy and potency on growth and immunophysiology of L. vannamei compared with the same species of these Bacillus bacteria but with an indigenous source. Also, administration of a mixture of commercial and indigenous sources of these Bacillus species in shrimps provided better growth condition and immune responses than the indigenous Bacillus alone.”
There was big news from DSM and Novozymes last month. Our report on the release of their new enzyme product came in at number three in our top hitting stories on social media sites in September. The article documents how the two companies have co-developed Balancius, an enzyme designed to remove bacterial cell debris from the animal’s gut, helping to optimize nutritional absorption and digestibility.
Initially, the product, which is a microbial muramidase, is being targeted at broiler production.
The enzyme has been shown to consistently improve feed conversion ratios by 4-6 points or 3%, said the partners.
David Blakemore, president of the animal nutrition and health division, described the product as breakthrough innovation.
“We have a very clear understanding of the science and the mode of action, and its impact in the animal.”
There was also a lot of interest in a story about microalgae coproducts and how they may provide an inexpensive partial replacement ingredient for fishmeal in farmed tilapia.
Pallab Sarker’s research team at Dartmouth University published the results of an initial digestibility and growth study examining the use of a coproduct generated from the microalgae Nannochloropsis oculata as a fishmeal substitute in tilapia feed.
“Previously, we discovered that fish oil can be replaced 100% by a microalgae,” he told FeedNavigator. “We achieved the success to replace fish oil, now we have to think about if fishmeal can be replaced with microalgae – we tried to replace fish oil by another microalga Schizochytrium sp. but in that case, we replaced not whole cells of microalgae but with a co-product – what is left after oil extraction.”
The initial study found that the coproduct was able to replace about 33% of the fishmeal while maintaining growth and fish performance, said Sarker. “But, if you want to [replace] higher level 80%-100%, then we need to treat it with enzymes to break down to the anti-nutritional elements,” he added.
There was also a lot of interest in last month's story about how BioMar asked commodity supply chains risk assessment provider, NEPCon, to scrutinize its soy value chain in Brazil, as part of the Danish company’s source-to-market rating process of its raw material portfolio – Sustainable Solutions Steering.
Erik Olav Gracey, global sustainability analyst, BioMar, told us why the company saw fit to commission the NEPCon review of soy production in Brazil.
“Brazilian soy has always been a hotspot feed ingredient for us. We have been in a dialogue with the Rainforest Foundation Norway about it as well. It is hot topic in Norway. We just wanted to learn more. We are a fish feed producer, not an environment assessment consultancy, yet we understand that we have a responsibility to have as much knowledge as possible about our value chain, about our raw materials. We decided to make Brazilian soy a case study for how we should go in depth in the triple S - Sustainable Solutions Steering – assessment.
“We are not in Brazil, we are not on the ground. We wanted to contact a third party that is impartial, that is expert in performing a risk assessment on these kind of commodities and that either has been in Brazil itself or has partners on the ground."
“I think the biggest takeaway for us [from this report] was more or less realizing that, in essence, we were a little too reliant on the standard and finding that there were a lot of aspects of Brazilian soy production that we weren’t completely aware of, and that could potentially lead to us having new risk assessment criteria when we perform audits, [and also] maybe some of our risk assessment scores will change depending on how we intend to use the results of this report.
“But I think, overall, it has just really increased our understanding of that specific part of our value chain and how we can incorporate that knowledge into audits so we can be really sure the soy we are sourcing and claiming as responsible through a standard actually is.”