Feed News from World

Global Feed and Food Congress

"The Food Chain: From Farm to Table" is the theme of the third Global Feed and Food Congress to be held 20-23 April 2010 in Cancun, Mexico. The event is the feed and food industry’s premier global animal feed event and is sponsored jointly by the International Feed Industry Federation and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Like the two congresses before it, the 2010 Congress seeks to bring together all stakeholders from the production, processing, and marketing of an industry spanning the entire food chain—from raw material and feed ingredient suppliers to integrators, processers, marketers and consumers.

"The Global Feed and Food Congress provides a wealth of opportunities for our industry to come together to examine the issues impacting feed and food production and marketing worldwide," says Roger Gilbert, IFIF secretary general. "The Congress is unique in its ability to gather together a large number of key decision makers at one event in order to discuss issues and consider solutions for the future of the global feed and food industries."

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Novus International, Inc. Acquires the Animal Nutrition Division of Albion Laboratories, Inc.

Novus International, Inc. announced today they have completed the acquisition of the Animal Nutrition Division of Albion Laboratories Inc, a company based in Clearfield, UT. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Products from the acquisition, including the MAAC (R) chelated trace mineral product line, will align with Novus’s MINTREX® and GLYTREX® chelated trace mineral products and further expand Novus's
mineral technology. This acquisition will enable Novus to offer a broader range of products to address the needs of different customers in different parts of the world to support their livestock operations.

Since its establishment in 1956, Albion has been an innovator in mineral chelate nutrition. Albion manufactures highly bioavailable, research based, nutritional chelated trace mineral forms and has a long-standing customer base in both the beef and dairy markets.

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Scientists: Reduce, don't ban, antibiotics

Is the high-pitched political wrangling over the use of antibiotics in livestock obscuring a legitimate public health concern?

Bold proclamations of doom by natural-food advocates notwithstanding, no one knows for sure the extent to which agriculture contributes to diseases' resistance to drugs meant to treat illness in humans and animals.

Even scientists who would abolish the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals concede that people are mainly to blame for an overuse of the drugs that researchers say caused 65,000 more deaths in the U.S. in 2008.

Exposure sources

Food is one of many potential sources of exposure to antibiotics for humans, who can also be exposed to the agents in such innocent things as Lysol and hand soaps, asserts Chad Mueller, an Oregon State University beef cattle systems researcher.

Still, many scientists -- including those in ag circles -- suspect that use of the drugs in livestock contributes to the resistance problem, and suggest that better management of herds can be part of a solution.

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Why Is It So Difficult to Eradicate Salmonella?

Feed contaminated by salmonella bacteria is a familiar and costly problem for the animal feed industry all over the world. Some types of salmonella have succeeded in establishing themselves in feed and fish meal factories and have persisted there for several years because it has proved impossible to eradicate them.

In her doctoral thesis, Lene Karine Vestby therefore studied why it is so difficult to get rid of salmonella once they have managed to establish themselves in Norwegian feed and fish meal factories. She discovered that salmonella bacteria efficient at forming biofilm (bacteria coating) survived for longer in the factories than those that had a reduced ability to form this coating. The ability to survive in factories therefore appears to be connected with the ability to form a biofilm and it would seem that removing biofilm is a necessary step towards eradicating salmonella from the factories.

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