How Precision Feeding is Moving Ruminant Feed Formulation Forward – INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES via Feedinfo Review

Improving the use of technology in animal agriculture has never been more important. With farmers facing rising costs due to factors like inflation and geopolitical issues, maximising the use of animal feed is something that all those involved in animal husbandry are focusing on. Precision feeding is a field that can heavily contribute to this and Lallemand Animal Nutrition is investing in this area to better support its customer base and improve income over feed cost through utilisation of its solutions. 

Feedinfo sat down with Aurélien Piron, Technical Manager for Ruminants, and Angel Aguilar, Director of Employee Training and Development for Ruminant Feed Additives at Lallemand to gain their views on advancements in this area, why this field is particularly important for ruminants, what is next for their business in this exciting discipline and how they are using this work to better support their customers. 

[Feedinfo] To start, can you explain how precision feeding can better support nutritionists and livestock producers?

[Feedinfo] Why is it so important to utilise precision feeding in the field of ruminant nutrition specifically?

[Angel Aguilar] Ruminants have a unique capacity to digest fibre (including cellulose) and to transform raw materials that cannot be used to feed humans into food products like milk or meat. Since the ruminant digestive system has this exceptional ability to degrade and ferment fibre through rumen microbial activity, the fibre components provided in the ration represent a significant amount of available energy for the animal. One of the key objectives for ruminant nutritionists when formulating rations is to maximise fibre digestibility to extract more energy from the fibrous components of the feed, leading to improved feed efficiency and IOFC.

When compared to monogastric species, precision feeding is newer and less advanced in ruminant feeding programs, so it is important to consider this new concept in animal husbandry strategies. Farm managers and nutritionists have to make decisions daily which are crucial for farm-profitability, choices like: “should I harvest this field of corn as silage, or should I sell it as grain?” Now being able to precisely measure feed intake (and thus feed efficiency) helps them to make the correct decision based on precise data. Today we can say that ruminant nutrition is finally catching up thanks to the progress in farm equipment including sensors and robotics.

[Feedinfo] Tell us about the work you have done in this area at Lallemand? How have you gone about making your research usable in a formulation and farming setting?

[Aurélien Piron] We are committed to provide the most advanced support to our customers. An example of the tools we provide to the field specifically dedicated to precision feeding is our ruminant live yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae CMCN I -1077 (LEVUCELL SC). For this product we have already invested in a lot in research to understand its mechanisms of action through more than 100 scientific publications over the 25 years since this strain was discovered in partnership with INRAE in France.

To explain this further, a software supplier once told me that now with our live yeast we are not only qualifying its effects, but we are able to quantify them, which makes a huge difference but also requires important and continuous R&D investment. In other words, if our customers share with us their diet composition and the quality of ingredients such as forage, the program will tell them the response of using Saccharomyces cerevisiae CNCM I1077 live yeast. This is significant, as now nutritionists can openly discuss with farm managers how the additive will best fit his or her strategy.

[Feedinfo] Can you explain more about how these sorts of tools benefit the farmer and wider industry?

[Aurélien Piron] Nutritionists are challenged today to make sure the decisions they take are the safest in terms of both animal performance and economics. Now we can predict the effect of an additive on animal performance for each specific diet conditions (in terms of both composition and ingredient quality). This will enable nutritionists to use additives like our live yeast as tools to fit to the farm manager’s objectives in terms of production and of course farm profitability. Addressing questions like “should I make more milk or should I adjust my diet composition to increase my IOFC?” is really a game changer during conditions of high price volatility. On top of this, giving nutritionists and producers the opportunity to switch from one source of nutrients to another without compromising on feed efficiency helps support greater flexibility and economic resilience.

We are working with leading software companies and support the integration of our models into our partners’ own software. Nutritionists can contact their Lallemand representative for more information.

[Feedinfo] What are some of the advances you and your team are seeing in precision livestock farming?

[Aurélien Piron] Today, farms have access to huge amounts of information in real time that can help them detect a performance deviation much earlier than before. The earlier they take decisions in terms of animal management, the lower their loss in terms of animal performance, cow health and farm profit. With the development of intelligent sensor systems, producers and nutritionists are able to predict dry matter intake and follow individual cow behaviour, providing the ability to measure, treat and analyse this data which leads to better management of the overall herd. In the field of ruminants, the next step in this ongoing technological development is the further use of artificial intelligence to monitor the herd and individual cows, to meet their needs each day.

[Feedinfo] What are the next steps for Lallemand and your work around precision feeding?

[Aurélien Piron] We are working hard to support nutritionists, premixers and feedmills in this new field. Our expertise enables us to help achieve the farm’s goals by selecting the right data and strategies and the LEVUCELL SC sub-model is just one example of this. By adding meaning and value into NDFd data, we help to achieve greater feed efficiency and better rumen health which means more milk from a healthier cow.

[Angel Aguilar] We also are highly involved in understanding how animal behaviour can be analysed to depict critical rumen efficiency. Our ultimate goal is working with partners to define how that information can be used in their daily work, so we are looking for opportunities to combine sensor data of cow behaviour and rumen health. We have the expertise tracking the cow’s rumen health, pH fluctuations in real time, and microbiota analysis, so this information could be used in future to help predict rumen health, as well as individual cow eating and resting behaviour.

We can further use this information to better understand the impact on the animal behaviour and overall animal welfare. For example, with robotic systems, cows can be fed individually with supplement by the robot machine. This allows us to “precision-feed” these cows, and add a specific supplement aligned with the individual needs of the cow. The goal is to be able to document and understand the impact of this feeding system on the individual cow health, behaviour, and overall performance. Exciting opportunities lie ahead in this innovative field.

Published in association with Lallemand Animal Nutrition