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The Nutreco R&D team organised a specialist meeting ahead of Agri Vision 2009, Nutreco’s biennial multi-stakeholder conference in June 2009. This brought together leading agriculture and food scientists from four continents – Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. Discussions shared current progress in a wide range of science disciplines that relate to animal nutrition. They demonstrated that animal nutrition can gain important knowledge from new disciplines being rapidly developed by the pharmaceutical and food industries to identify the relationships of nutrition, the microbial population of the intestine and genetics. The benefits to agriculture from this work will be in the mid to long term. For instance nutritional ingredients can influence the expression of individual genes. It is being referred to as nutrigenomics and increased understanding will contribute to efficiency, animal health and welfare and to reducing environmental impact.
A second conclusion indicated there are substantial gains to be won in the near future from adapting and applying technologies already available. Examples include faster and more accurate analysis of conventional and new feed raw materials, breeding technology and more precise farm management. Many new raw materials are coming from advancing food and fuel technologies. Developments in fermentation technology are creating new opportunities with functional feed ingredients that support animal health and final product quality.
A third conclusion at InnoVision was that interdisciplinary cooperation among the sciences is increasingly important in identifying the many potential animal nutrition benefits available in the rapidly expanding knowledge base. Bioinformatics, the technology to extract meaningful information from a vast shared database, will play a central role in making this a practical possibility.
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