Leveraging innovation and creativity to support the global poultry industry

Introduction

The poultry industry is successfully meeting many challenges, including offering consumers a healthy and affordable source of protein while limiting the use of chemical compounds to support optimised animal health and each step of the production stream. By partnering and merging with the best feed additive players in the market, Cargill has developed one of the most robust portfolios of additives in the industry to help our customers thrive along their journey.

Q1: What makes Cargill's additive portfolio so unique?

Cargill's additive portfolio is unique in size and content. This is one of the densest portfolios, including a wide range of solutions based on very different technologies: from phytogenics to postbiotics, and including mycotoxin mitigants, enzymes, and antioxidants.

It is also unique in its potential – the number of ingredients is such that the combinations are exceptional, and it is up to us to select the best combinations likely to meet the specific needs and expectations of our customers. We see this portfolio as a huge library from which we can draw the best books. Each ingredient – each molecule in this library of additives – carries its own benefits and we can also expect interesting synergies between these ingredients.

Q2: Can you give us examples of these potential synergies?

There is still a lot to discover; however, we have already been able to highlight a very interesting synergy between essential oil compounds and postbiotics for example. These two categories of additives have very different modes of action and sites of action along the digestive tract, which combine perfectly without overlapping. This has enabled us to bring to market what we believe is the first solution combining these two categories.

The feedback from our customers is very positive. It encourages us to increase our efforts to innovate and offer our customers new and even more efficient solutions. Tomorrow we may consider combining the effects of enzymes on the digestibility of nutrients with the capacity of certain phytogenics to reinforce digestive health. The possibilities are endless!

Q3: Have you observed the effectiveness of these combinations of additives on animal performance?

Absolutely. Speaking about Dia-V? MBPRO, our new broiler performance booster solution combining essential oils with postbiotics, we have conducted several global trials – in the field and controlled studies – in broilers. We pulled the results from all these studies into a meta-analysis to evaluate the performance improvement we can expect with this solution.

In this meta-analysis, we observed that the supplemented birds showed a strong and significant reduction in FCR, paired with a heavier body weight at market age. Additionally, and very interestingly, the supplemented broilers also showed a higher breast meat yield.

Overall, including this unique combination in the diet can help optimise digestibility and performance in broilers, and provides an attractive economic return to producers.

As well, we mix phytogenics with organic acids (as Biostrong? Forte) and more globally demonstrate that phytogenics work synergistically with other feed solution technologies – for example, exogenous enzymes. This demonstration is significantly highlighted when we use Cargill’s Galleon? Microbiome Assessment technology to measure the birds’ gut flora profile evolution.

We also blend phytogenics with organic acids (Intella? Fit Plus) or medium-chain fatty acids (Biostrong? Forte). Phytogenics work well with other feed solutions, including feed enzymes. Again, these synergies are highlighted by our Galleon technology – our artificial intelligence-based platform – as our customers are able to monitor microbiota dynamics.

Q4: What are the next steps of this adventure for Cargill?

Beyond the usual KPIs used by the industry like body weight and feed conversion ratio, we observed very interesting side benefits of our solution on other parameters such as carcase quality traits. Our objective now is to confirm these observations with research and trials that include larger numbers of birds.

For this reason, we are now running many field trials with our customers in a wide range of geographies. It’s very exciting as the initial results obtained go beyond what we observed in experimental conditions. We will focus our efforts on the deployment of this portfolio while maintaining our efforts on innovation. More to come in the next few months!

Q5: Do you see the customers’ expectations evolving? Is the industry still focusing on the same benefits?

Different regions have different expectations throughout the world. The broiler industry is and will remain driven by economics; we need to maintain our efforts to reduce our customers’ production costs. Nevertheless, some very relevant new expectations are rising in certain regions. We receive more and more questions linked to sustainability and animal welfare.

These two dimensions are already considered when we develop new solutions. We benefit from the efforts of a Cargill team dedicated to sustainability, allowing us to calculate, for example, the benefits of our additives in terms of resource savings. In parallel, Cargill is developing a digital offering that includes software solutions using artificial intelligence to pilot broiler flock performance and monitor the impact of our industry on the environment.

We already – and will continue to – partner with our customers to go beyond the current and upcoming challenges our industry is facing.

Conclusion

Cargill’s global portfolio of poultry additives is one of the most complete portfolios within the animal industry, and a source of endless innovation and creativity. By investing in research and development, we are positioning Cargill as a leader in the world of feed additives today, and also tomorrow.