The feed industry relies on a wide range of plant-based products as feed ingredients for swine and poultry. For sustainability and circularity reasons, the interest in alternative protein sources to soybean meal has increased over the years.
In addition, partially driven by sustainability ambitions and to avoid the competition between food and feed, more low-value side-streams produced in the EU will become available for utilization in animal feed. However, said low-value side-streams (which can be both agricultural as well as forestry side streams) are often of low nutritional value given their low digestibility and low crude protein content and availability. Therefore, these side-streams are still underutilized despite their potential for use as a low-cost feed ingredient.
The aim of this project is to upcycle these low-value/low-nutritional side-streams into highly digestible ingredients for pig and broiler diet formulations using a low cost and mild process to allow implementation of the technology on a broad scale.
Fermentation is already employed for decades as a key technology to stabilize feed and reduce anti-nutritional factors (ANF) and is implemented on an industrial scale. At present, limited information is available regarding the use of fermentation technology to specifically increase the nutritional value of low-value side-streams for monogastric animals such as swine and poultry.
The PPP FEFO is a collaboration between the knowledge partners Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Schothorst Feed Research (SFR) and a consortium of different private partners from the agricultural feed sector (i.e. feed industry and feed fermentation partners) and partly financed by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LWV22.115).
The goals within this project are:
- To use fermentation to upcycle widely and locally available low-value, low nutritional value substrates into well digestible and good nutritional ingredients as a cost-effective alternative to currently higher carbon footprint imported feed ingredients.
- To develop a standardized high throughput screening format for solid state fermentations to understand which processes sufficiently unlock the nutrients in low-value by-products for ultimate incorporation into pig and poultry diets.
- To upscale promising processes to allow in-vitro and later in vivo evaluation in animal trials (performance and digestibility). This will be accompanied by a techno-economical assessment. This will be accompanied by a techno-economical assessment.
Start project: 01/04/2023
End of project: 30/06/2027
Partners
Arvesta B.V.
Cooperativa d’Ivars
Cooperl
Coren SCG
FermentationExperts A.S.
ForFarmers Nederland B.V.
ISF Gmbh
METEX Animal Nutrition
Nijsen Company B.V.
Nutrival SL
Phileo by Lesaffre
Schaffelaarbos B.V.
Schothorst Feed Research B.V.
Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, Wageningen Plant Research & Wageningen Animal Science Group
1 The results belong to the members of the PPS project. The results will not be shared during the regular consultancy activities for AFP during a period of time. De resultaten worden gedurende een bepaalde periode niet gedeeld tijdens de reguliere consultancy werkzaamheden voor AFP.