Own budget leads to great innovations
For four years now, SFR has had its own innovation budget to initiate researchers itself. SFR employees can submit an idea. A scientific team then collects this, asks for further substantiation and ultimately allocates a budget. Head of R&D at SFR, Francesc Molist, talks about the steps taken in 2024 and the plans for next year.
Within its own innovation budget, work will be done in the period 2022-2025 within three major topics: methane, alternatives to animal testing and sustainability. In addition, there is also available budget for short-term innovation projects.
Within the first topic, one feeding trial with dairy cows was performed in 2024 within the PPS Rumenhealth project. Until now, in the market mainly chemical components are sold to reduce methane emissions in dairy cows. The objective of this project is to test natural solutions against methane emissions. In the first quarter of 2025, a second trial will be conducted to make the link between gut health and methane emissions in dairy cows. ‘Our researcher Marije is going to get her PhD with the results obtained from this project.
Interesting alternatives to animal trials
A number of interesting projects have been started within the topic of alternatives to animal trials. For example, we investigated how we can reproduce the digestion of protein and starch-rich ingredients in swine and poultry in our SFR lab, without the utilization of animals. We also investigated whether we can simulate the fermentation of fiber reach ingredients with the use of faeces as inoculum. We will continue this in 2025.
We are looking for alternatives to rumen fistulated cows with the utilization of rumen fluid obtained from the slaughterhouse and we use infrared in manure to measure faster the digestibility of the main nutrients, this method on the long-term would be able to replace chemical analysis in the lab.
The sow model that SFR has developed also falls under this theme. Our researchers want to develop a model for growing-finishing pigs and broilers by 2025.
Individual feeding stations in broiler breeders
The theme of sustainability includes Laura Star’s PPP research into controlling the individual nutrient intake of broiler breeders. We carried out the last trial in the SFR farm in 2024, we will analyze all the results and conclude the project in 2025.
Within FEFO we investigate how to increase the nutrient availability of fiber-rich by-products in swine and poultry by means of solid state fermentation. The in-vitro technology for this has been developed and validated by WUR in 2024. In 2025 we will have an scale up of the technology.
In the Gut2Go project we investigate the effect of hygiene, nutrition and enrichment in improving the welfare in pigs with long tails. We want to have an holistic approach to be able to define what means sustainability in the swine production chain.
And a new PPP project has been approved in 2024. Researcher Laura will investigate how to define sustainability in broiler chickens in the Pecking the Future project, together with 17 partners. This project runs from 2025 to 2028. We have just signed the consortium agreement for this.
‘Great developments in the past year, but also plenty of plans and ideas for the coming years’, Francesc concludes.