Improving the overall digestibility of feeds to decrease their costs per kg of liveweight

Cereals and oilseeds, which provide nutrients at a reasonable cost for animal production, are the main macro ingredients of feeds. However, they also contain several anti-nutritional factors (ANF) and indigestible substrates that degrade the performance of animals. These ANFs negatively impact the cost of proteins for animals, such as broilers. Providing information on the indigestible components of feeds, for example, phytates and specific types of dietary fiber, and on their interaction in poultry feeds is key to capturing the value of exogenous enzymes, to alleviate the negative impact of these ANFs. In order to estimate the potential of enzymes in animal diets, nutritionists first need to know what fraction of the nutrients is not digested. As enzymes turn part of indigestible nutrients into digestible ones, knowing the amount of indigestible nutrients in a feed makes it easier to evaluate the potential of the enzymes response. It has been demonstrated that the best way of evaluating improvements in feed digestibility is to consider several exogenous enzymes as a unique enzyme solution, which acts on a part of a unique digestion process that attacks the indigestible dietary fraction and releases nutrients from it. This approach is known as the Feedase approach. Feedase involves considering the whole feed as a substrate of a global enzymatic solution, which results in an improvement of the digestibility of all the nutrients, including fat, starch, proteins, phosphorus, etc… Through this new approach, the effects of the enzymes are no longer only linked to a specific nutrient, but to the indigestible dietary fraction, which is reduced because of the complementary actions of enzymes.

How should we behave in a scenario with a higher cost of ingredients ?

Extracting the most from a feed is the best solution, and simple enzymes and/or lower doses can usually save cents/ton of feed, but also result in losing dozens of dollars per ton of meat. Enzymes can release such nutrients as energy, P, and AA, but they are dependent on the substrate in the different raw materials. We have demonstrated efficacy variations close to 50%, depending on the nutritional parameters and the substrate. The full potential of our multi carbohydrase and phytase complex has been well described, and it can be modeled to specific cases to obtain the best results for the customer.

This proposal has been demonstrated in a study realized at the Schothorst Feed Research Center (SFR) in the Netherlands on a corn-wheat-soy based diet. Different levels of nutritional parameters were tested, with or without a multi carbohydrase and phytase complex at 1000 FTU (Rovabio® Advance Phy). ln this trial, we evaluated the economic results, comparing a diet (no nutrient reduction in the diet), with or without Rovabio® Advance Phy, with a negative control (reduction of nutrients in the diet), with or without Rovabio® Advance Phy, considering the actual raw material prices. As shown in Figure 4, Rovabio® Advance can successfully recover more than 4% AME and dAA reductions, accompanied by either 0.12 or 0.23 % points of avP reduction. Since the numbers of substrates in the enzymes, such as arabinoxylans or phytates, were not the same in the twelve different feeds, the performance results imply that Rovabio® Advance Phy does not show a linear response. However, whatever the diet was, it consistently improved the performance in all the considered cases, thus demonstrating the importance of evaluating a complex of enzymes in diets containing different numbers of substrates for the enzymes at the same time.

An economic analysis was developed in which the diet without any reduction and no enzymes was compared with a diet without any reduction of the multi carbohydrolase complex with phytase (MCPC). A second comparison was conducted between all the diets with reduced amounts of nutrients and no enzymes and all the diets reduced in nutrients containing MCPC. The use of MCPC together with the full diet specifications resulted in the best FCR. The use of Rovabio® Advance Phy resulted in a lower feed cost /kg of broilers, when the enzyme was used together with a nutritional matrix.

When the MCPC was added, it decreased the cost of the feed/kg of broilers by 1.7%. However, the best cost of the feed/kg of bird was achieved by lowering the diet specifications and adding enzymes. In this case, the advantage for the group with enzyme was 4%, compared with the same diets without enzymes, or 3.2% compared with the full diet specifications without enzymes, despite the excellent FCR of this diet.

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