Agriculture Business Week

Researchers from Ireland found that treatment with probiotic bacteria reduced Salmonella infection in pigs and may have potential human applications. They report their findings in the March 2007 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Salmonella spp. is one of the major causes of food-borne gastroenteritis worldwide, with an estimated 160,000 cases reported annually in the European Union alone.

Probiotics, described as live microorganisms believed to promote a health benefit in the host when administered in controlled amounts, have emerged in recent years as an alternative method to counteract bacterial infections. Previous studies have focused largely on the lactic acid bacteria (LAB) group and many have shown beneficial effects in small animal models challenged with gastrointestinal infection.

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Posted on July 30th, 2009 under Livestock. Tags: Pigs/Hogs, Probiotics, Salmonella. Comments: None

HIGH-TECH CONTRACT GROWERS
Not the typical contract growers are the brothers Arvin and Angel Bryan Yumul who run a high-tech automated broiler farm in Lian, Batangas. Between the two of them, they raise 100,000 broilers at a time, housed in five buildings, each containing 20,000 chickens.

Angel Bryan, 36, and the younger brother, is a biology graduate from La Salle and he is the expert in farm animals, says his brother.

On the other hand, Arvin is a mechanical engineer who appears to be deeply obsessed with the latest gadgets that are available in the industry. He regularly travels to the United States to observe the latest machines and equipment that will make raising chickens as automated as possible. That is why you will not smell the usual foul odor encountered in an ordinary poultry farm when you visit their Lightning Ridge Farm in Brgy.Binubusan, Lian town. You will be lucky if you see a fly in their farm.

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Posted on July 16th, 2009 under Poultry. Tags: Antibiotics, Poultry, Probiotics. Comments: 11

Don’t look now, but the growing trend in poultry production is toward the use of more probiotics and less of antibiotics. This is the case not only in the raising of free-range chickens but also in the mass production of broilers – the so-called white chicken which are produced by the millions throughout the year

The growing trend is for a good reason. Consumers are increasingly becoming health-conscious and are shying away from poultry meat packed with antibiotic residue. Antibiotics, of course, are the main weapon of poultry raisers in subduing deadly respiratory diseases. The trouble is that many poultry raisers tend to depend largely on these drugs, to the extent that they are overdoing it. Many of them think that the more antibiotics they use, the better for their flock’s health.

The trouble is that the excessive use of antibiotics results in high antibiotic residue in the poultry meat. And this is bad because the consumers who eat the antibiotic-loaded chicken will imbibe the drug. And the possibility is that when the time comes that it is necessary for the consumer to take medication, the antibiotic may no longer be effective in treating the human ailment. The bacteria causing the disease may have developed resistance to the antibiotic.

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Posted on July 15th, 2009 under Poultry. Tags: Antibiotics, Poultry, Probiotics. Comments: None

Trials in Shrimp
The Sanolife Bacillus strains, when applied through the feed (top dressed at the farm site or at the feed mill), have been evaluated in shrimp grow out (Litopenaeus vannamei, L. stylirostris and Penaeus monodon ) in Asia, the Pacific region and Latin America. The application of these bacteria (concentration ranging from 1 x 107 to 1.5 x 108 cfu/g feed according to rearing conditions), in association with suitable pond management, has led to marked benefits to the farmers:
1. Faster growth – Scientists at IFREMER showed in a controlled experiment with replicates that there was a very significant increase in growth rate when the Sanolife Bacillus strains were mixed with the feed pellets shortly before feeding the shrimp (Moriarty et al., 2006). Similar improvements in growth rates were recorded with L. vannamei under commercial conditions in Ecuador and Brazil (Figure 1 ).

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Posted on July 12th, 2009 under Aquaculture. Tags: Fish, Probiotics, Shrimp. Comments: 2

Despite the doubts about probiotics – Due to unrealistic claims, poor quality products or mode of delivery – appropriate probiotics do actually work in aquaculture production.

Olivier Decamp and David Moriarty explain
Aquaculture is developing and intensifying in most regions of the world in response to the increasing demand for aquatic food products (FAO, 2006). This intensity has led to an increased use and misuse of drugs and chemicals in aquaculture, resulting in food safety concerns. Several alternative strategies to the prophylactic use of antibiotics in disease control have been proposed: installment of biosecurity management, effective vaccination, stimulation of the non-specific defense mechanisms of the host (alone or in combination with vaccines), as well as microorganisms (probiotics). Defining probiotics is a challenge – even more so for aquaculture applications. Historically, probiotics were defined according to their expected benefit or improvement to the host’s intestinal balance. Being concerned with humans and terrestrial animals, probiotics were generally Gram-positive obligate or facultative anaerobes, mostly lactic bacteria.

Fish are different
Aquatic animals differ from terrestrial animals in the level of interaction between the intestinal microbiota and the surrounding environment. The bacteria present in the aquatic environment influence the composition of the gut microflora and vice versa. This environmental influence is much greater for shrimp and other invertebrates than for fish. The bacterial community composition of the intestinal tract of aquatic animals is different from that found in terrestrial animals. Gram-negative facultative anaerobes generally prevail in the digestive tract of fish and shellfish; Gram-positive obligate or facultative anaerobes dominate that of humans and terrestrial animals (Gatesoupe, 1999). Aquatic animals are poikilothermic and their associated microbiota may vary with temperature changes; salinity changes in the rearing environment will also affect the microbiota. An important consequence is that the most efficient probiotics used for aquaculture will differ from those for terrestrial species.

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Posted on July 11th, 2009 under Aquaculture. Tags: Fish, Probiotics, Shrimp. Comments: 1

More and more knowledge and experience is being gained on how probiotics should be used to give reliable results. Through a more exact knowledge of the mode of action of each individual probiotic, it will be possible to make further improvements.

In spite of the unknown data on the physiology of the gut microflora, from the results obtained with  probiotic use, we are beginning to understand more about the variations involved. Indeed, despite their present low efficiency, it can be a starting point to achieve more efficient microbial strains, thanks to today’s biotechnological processes.

The use of foods derived from microbial activity goes back to the dawn of human civilisation and fermented milks were probably the first foods to contain active microorganisms. The beneficial effect of fermented milk was given a scientific basis at the beginning of the twentieth century by Elie Metchnikoff. Interest in the gut microflora revived after the Second World War and it the necessity that the microbial cells be viable. Probiotics are live micro-organisms that, when administered through the digestive route, are favourable to the host’s health.

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Posted on June 27th, 2009 under Poultry. Tags: Chicken, NUTRACEUTICALS, Probiotics. Comments: 11