Agriculture Business Week

Legumes are the richest and cheapest common source of protein among all foods of plant origin. Protein found in legumes is a cheap substitute for fish, chicken, pork, and other meats. Aside from being an important food in the human diet, legumes are also good supplementary feed for livestock and poultry.

Legumes-soybean, mungbean, peanut, string bean, winged bean, to name a few – are special kinds of plants. They have the ability to hide bacteria in their roots, which form nodules (numerous rounded masses in the roots). The bacteria present in these nodules catch nitrogen from the air and transform it into usable form and supply it to the soil to be used by the next crop.

“Though nitrogen is abundant in nature – cycling between the atmosphere, soil and living organisms-it is only directly available to plants when converted through biological or industrial processes to certain forms, primarily ammonium and nitrate,” explains Lindsay Watkins, seed bank manager of the Florida-based Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO).

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Feed compounders and animal nutritionists should take a second, hard look at fish meal processing and utilization for animal feeds. The facts and figures are overwhelming: All fish species used for fish meal and fish oil in both the Pacific and the Atlantic are very important for the marine ecosystem, as they prey for fish, birds and mammals. Increased exploitation of these species to meet the demands from an expanding fish farm industry could very well turn out to be an ecological time bomb.

The November 10, 2008 editorial of The New York Times titled “The Protein Pyramid” is quite alarming, and must be borne in mind when using fish meal as an animal protein source in aquafeeds and monogastric rations. Here it is:

“Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat eat before it becomes meat?

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A PhilRice researcher has found a safer and milder way of changing the structure of gluten, a major byproduct of starch processing, thereby increasing its value, utilization, and market potential.

Gluten is a mixture of proteins in cereal grains which is responsible for the elasticity of kneaded bread.

In her paper which won the best paper in the basic research category during the recent scientific conference of the Federation of Crop Science Societies of the Philippines, Dr. Marissa V. Romero said the modification was done by using enzymes to perform the process of hydrolysis and deamidation.

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Paul Groenewegen, NuPro’s global manager, talks about the versatile natural yeast extract that’s making waves in the animal nutrition world.

Animal scientists say the body weight of a chick after the first week is strongly linked to its final body weight. According to Alltech’s Dr. Alison Leary, the first week of a chick’s life is also when the highest amount of energy is being used for growth rather than maintenance. That being said, offering chicks ingredients that contain highly digestible nutrients and increasing their feed intake could result in significant growth performance which is closer to their genetic potential.

Alltech, a leading animal health company, recently re-introduced NuPro, a yeast derived protein source to the Philippine agribusiness community. This natural spray-dried beige powder yeast extract is considered versatile because it isn’t only good for poultry animals but also for other animal species including pigs, livestock, pets and even aquaculture species.

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