Strategien für eine Nachhaltige Tierernährung

The enormous increase in the production of foods of animal origin in the past century was mainly achieved through an ever-increasing use of high quality feed, which would be suitable in principle as human food. This benefited the production of beef, pork, milk, eggs and chicken in particular. The efficiency of transforming feed into animal products significantly increases in this order and correspondingly, environmentally relevant excretions decline. However, within the next decades a doubling of the global demand for foods of animal origin is expected. At the same time, high quality feed will compete with its direct use as food as well as industrial raw material. As a result, animal nutrition will be forced to use inedible-biomass to a much higher extent, leading to losses in transformation efficiency and productivity as well as an increase of environmentally relevant emissions from animal production. For this reason, special efforts must be made to optimize the feed-quality of inedible-biomass, for example by suitable harvesting-, conservation- and processing techniques as well as feed additives, which support and extend the functionality of the digestive system of livestock. Another task is the processing of agricultural biomass, which was previously not useable as feed because of esirable ingredients. This has to be done by the removal of toxins (e.g. in protein-rich residues from plant oil recovery) through breeding programs, but also by purification of valuable ingredients through technical processing (e.g. extraction of protein from residues of green (bio) technologies). Finally, the available feed resources have to be used in the animal production systems with the highest transformation efficiencies. In summary, animal nutrition research must urgently find innovative approaches to mitigate the serious conflicts in the provision of foods of animal origin.