Embracing sustainability: A necessity for the future

Tradeshows, conferences, and magazines all highlight sustainability as the number one priority for the future. While regulations are yet to be fully defined and can vary significantly from one region to another, there is no doubt that sustainability will become a paramount concern.

Within the animal feed industry, many companies find themselves in a phase of exploration, seeking to shape their short and long-term strategies. Here are some invaluable insights to consider to navigate the path towards sustainable animal feed production.

Unlocking sustainability in feed formulation: How to maximise nutrition and minimise cost with an eco-friendly approach

Feed producers everywhere are striving to make their feeds as efficient, nutritious, and cost-effective as possible. But with the ever-increasing pressure to reduce environmental impact, feed formulation has become an even more complex process.

Fortunately, by strategically managing and optimising feed formulation based on nutrition and cost while considering environmental impact, you can achieve these goals without sacrificing one for the other. In this article, we discuss how you can use a sustainable approach to unlock the potential of your feed formulation and deliver maximum nutritional value with minimum cost.

Unlock the full potential of your feed formula and maximise its nutritional value, all while keeping costs low. Discover how to do it with a sustainable strategy.

The first step in optimising feed formulation for sustainability is to analyse the current environmental footprint of your feed production. This includes assessing the sources of ingredients, such as evaluating the water and energy use of different feed crops. When assessing ingredient sourcing, you should also consider issues such as soil health, air quality, and animal welfare. Once you understand your current environmental impact, you can begin to make changes that will reduce it going forward.

Next, you need to focus on optimising your feed formulation from a nutritional perspective. To do this, you need to consider the needs of both humans and animals who will consume the feed. For example, consider how much protein, fibre, fat, and other key nutrients are required by various species and what additives and vitamins are necessary for optimal nutrition. Adjusting levels for different nutrients in each batch can ensure that your feed meets all dietary requirements while maintaining a consistent nutritive value over time.

Finally, do not forget to factor in cost when optimising your feed formulation. While using high-quality ingredients may increase production costs, they can end up saving money eventually if they provide superior nutrition and result in healthier animals. Additionally, selecting locally-sourced ingredients whenever possible can help reduce transportation costs associated with importing materials from overseas or distant areas within your own country.

By taking an integrated approach to managing and optimising feed formulation based on nutrition and cost while considering environmental impact, you can achieve sustainable success without sacrificing one goal for another. By analysing the current environmental footprint of your production process and then strategically adjusting formulations on a nutritional level while considering cost efficiency, you can unlock the potential of your feeds to provide maximum nutritional value with minimum cost, all while reducing their ecological impact along the way.

Bestmix software and BASF have joined forces to enhance feed formulations, aiming to provide essential insights into the ecological impact of feed production.

With these challenges in mind, Bestmix software and BASF have partnered to optimise feed formulation and support more sustainable animal protein production. With this partnership and the resulting combination of both solutions, the need for in-depth consultancy studies, which are both expensive and time-consuming, no longer exists. Nutritionists and formulators themselves now have full control to make the best choices to reduce the environmental impact of their feeds and rations.

Karel Vervaet, senior product specialist at Bestmix Software: “We recognise the importance of sustainability as one of the game-changers in the animal feed sector and other nutrition industries for the coming years. This tool allows Bestmix users to include sustainability as a parameter in their formulations and rations. Extending insights and minimising environmental impact by using the enhanced Bestmix allow the industry to grow jointly toward a more sustainable future.”

So how does this all come together? Bestmix and BASF Animal Nutrition have joined forces, connecting Opteinics (BASFs sustainability analytics system) to the Bestmix feed formula platform. Bestmix and BASF Animal Nutrition have integrated BASF’s sustainability analytics solution, Opteinics, with the Bestmix feed formulation software.

Opteinics is a digital solution to enable feed and animal producers to assess and improve their environmental impact directly at the feed formulation stage. Making use of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), a technique that assesses the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, Opteinics (Optimising Protein Analytics) provides transparency on the impacts of both compound feed and the final animal protein produced.

Tom Battagliese, senior manager, Global Sustainability Metrics for BASF Animal Nutrition: “BASF’s Opteinics functionality provides the ability to assess feed formulation scenarios and associated life cycle sustainability impacts rapidly and dynamically, directly within Bestmix. Thanks to our close cooperation with Bestmix feed formulators, we can devise the most sustainable formulations within defined cost tolerances.”

Bestmix software allows nutritionists and formulators to manage and optimise nutrition and cost attributes of feed and ration formulation.

With this integration, Bestmix and Opteinics users can dynamically assess the environmental impact directly at the feed formulation stage without compromising on cost or nutrition. Thus, customer organisations profit from significantly reduced time and resource investment when innovating in their product portfolio, obtaining data for sustainability reporting, or communicating environmental impact reduction to customers and other stakeholders.