17: Future technologies in pigs & poultry nutrition

The economic room for technologically and nutritionally more advanced diets will increase in the future. The processing of animal feed currently has a number of beneficial effects including the improvements in feed efficiency and to find the right balance between animal health and efficiency. In the feed mill diagrams, a large diversity of equipment and systems can be found. This diversity is already present for each different unit operations: in the case of particle size reduction, there is a large choice in special equipment and the way the different steps are set up into a grinding system. For agglomeration e.g. these may vary from having large flexibility in more basic production of different feed forms, up to applying sophisticated equipment (expanders, compactors) to improve nutrient digestibility and pellet quality to strive towards high quality feeds. Farms are becoming larger and in certain countries farmer are using on-farm processing of feed ingredients in addition to purchased concentrates. There is a small but growing trend in organic farming to include the use of other ingredients for animal diets such as grass for sows, fermented ingredients, etc. and some are of the opinion that a new business model will emerge in agriculture where the objective has to be a balance between economy, ecology and society, called 'sustainable precision husbandry'.