Unlocking Sustainability in Feed Formulation: How to Maximize Nutrition and Minimize Cost with an Eco-Friendly Approach
Feed producers everywhere are striving to make their feeds as efficient, nutritious and cost-effective as possible. But with the ever-increasing pressure to reduce environmental impact, feed formulation has become an even more complex process. Fortunately, by strategically managing and optimizing feed formulation based on nutrition and cost while considering environmental impact, you can achieve these goals without sacrificing one for the other. In this article, we discuss how you can use a sustainable approach to unlock the potential of your feed formulation and deliver maximum nutritional value with minimum cost.
Unlock the full potential of your feed formula and maximize its nutrition value, all while keeping costs low - discover how to do it with a sustainable strategy.
The first step in optimizing feed formulation for sustainability is to analyze the current environmental footprint of your feed production. This includes assessing the sources of ingredients, such as evaluating the water and energy use of different feed crops. You should also consider issues such as soil health, air quality, and animal welfare when assessing ingredient sourcing. Once you understand your current environmental impact, you can begin to make changes that will reduce it going forward.
Next, you need to focus on optimizing your feed formulation from a nutritional perspective. To do this, you need to consider the needs of both humans and animals who will consume the feed. For example, consider how much protein, fiber, fat, and other key nutrients are required by various species. You should also think about what kinds of additives and vitamins are necessary for optimal nutrition. Adjusting levels for different nutrients in each batch can ensure that your feed meets all dietary requirements while maintaining a consistent nutritive value over time.
Finally, do not forget to factor in cost when optimizing your feed formulation. While using high-quality ingredients may increase production costs, they can end up saving money eventually if they provide superior nutrition and result in healthier animals. Additionally, selecting locally sourced ingredients whenever possible can help reduce transportation costs associated with importing materials from overseas or distant areas within your own country.
By taking an integrated approach to managing and optimizing feed formulation based on nutrition and cost while considering environmental impact, you can achieve sustainable success without sacrificing one goal for another. By analyzing the current environmental footprint of your production process and then strategically adjusting formulations on a nutritional level while considering cost efficiency, you can unlock the potential of your feeds to provide maximum nutritional value with minimum cost—all while reducing their ecological impact along the way
BESTMIX software and BASF have teamed up to refine feed formulations for the purpose of creating an eco-friendlier way to produce animal proteins
With these challenges in mind, BESTMIX software and BASF have partnered on optimizing feed formulation and supporting more sustainable animal protein production. With this partnership and the resulting combination of both solutions, the need for in-depth consultancy studies, which are both expensive and time-consuming, no longer exists. Nutritionists and formulators themselves now have full control to make the best choices to reduce the environmental impact of their feeds and rations.
So how does this all come together? BESTMIX and BASF Animal Nutrition have joined forces, connecting Opteinics (BASFs sustainability analytics system) to the BESTMIX feed formula platform.
Bestmix and BASF Animal Nutrition have integrated BASF’s sustainability analytics solution, Opteinics, with the BESTMIX® feed formulation software.
Opteinics is a digital solution to enable feed and animal producers to assess and improve their environmental impact, directly at the feed formulation stage. Making use of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), a technique that assesses the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, Opteinics (“Optimizing Protein Analytics”) provides transparency on the impacts of both compound feed and the final animal protein produced.
BESTMIX® software allows nutritionists and formulators to manage and optimize nutrition and cost attributes of feed and ration formulation.
With this integration, BESTMIX® and Opteinics users can dynamically assess the environmental impact directly at the feed formulation stage, without compromising on cost or nutrition. Thus, customer organizations profit from significantly reduced time and resource investment when innovating in their product portfolio, obtaining data for sustainability reporting, or communicating environmental impact reduction to customers and other stakeholders.
We recognize the importance of sustainability as one of the game changers in the animal feed sector and other nutrition industries for the coming years,” says Karel Vervaet, Sr. Product Specialist Nutrition at BESTMIX. “This tool allows BESTMIX users to include sustainability as a parameter in their formulations and rations. Extending insights and minimizing environmental impact by using the enhanced BESTMIX® allow the industry to grow jointly toward a more sustainable future.
BASF’s Opteinics functionality provides the ability to assess feed formulation scenarios and associated life cycle sustainability impacts rapidly and dynamically, directly within BESTMIX®" says Tom Battagliese, Senior Sustainability Manager at BASF Animal Nutrition. Thanks to our close cooperation with BESTMIX® feed formulators we can devise the most sustainable formulations within defined cost tolerances.
