Three ways organic acids impact the nutritional value of feed

Organic acid solutions are one of the most common ways to mitigate enteric pathogenic bacteria. There are several ways that organic acids have proven useful for the nutritional value your animals get out of their feed:
1. Mitigating pathogens in the feed
2. Supporting animals to manage consumed pathogens 
3. Helping to prevent nutrient degradation due to excessive heating

Mitigating pathogens in the feed
Pathogenic enteric bacteria have a hard time surviving in feed with a lowered pH. Specific organic acids have proven very efficient at mitigating the pathogenic load of feedstuffs, ingredients and finished feeds. More developed solutions may even incorporate essential oils for even higher effectiveness and thus protection of the animals.

Supporting animals to manage consumed pathogens
A compromised microflora in the gut can potentially reduce the animal’s ability to extract nutrients from feed. When organic acid based solutions remain in the feed post pelleting, they reduce the pH in the stomach of farm animals. This makes the animal’s digestive system a less hospitable environment for pathogenic bacteria. In other words the pathogens that somehow do manage to make it into the animals digestive tract are less likely to cause negative effects. 

Helping to prevent nutrient degradation due to excessive heating
Heat treatment is one of the most widely accepted ways to reduce pathogenic bacteria in feed. It has proven effective for this purpose. However it has 2 drawbacks that need to be considered; first of all excessive heating has shown to negatively impact the nutrients in the feed and their availability. Secondly, with heat treatment there is a risk of recontamination of treated feed during the cooling-drying phase. Research has shown that optimal results were achieved with reduced heat conditioning (65°, 2 min) in combination with an effective organic acid based solution such as ProPhorce™ SA Exclusive.

Well formulated organic acid based solutions can reduce the temperatures that are needed to treat the feed against pathogens, thus potentially enabling a higher nutritional value from the feed. These products protect the treated feed against recontamination. We have seen the best results when the feed is treated with the organic acid solution after heating but have also clearly seen that highly concentrated products do make it into the final product through a heating process at 65° C. 

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