Coen Smits, Global Sustainability Director at Nutreco’s livestock feed business line, Trouw Nutrition, gave his inaugural lecture at Wageningen University as chair Functional ingredients for sustainable animal nutrition. The presentation was entitled “Functional feed for sustainable food.”
The lecture focused on the sustainability challenges facing the livestock industry, and how functional foods play a role in helping us produce more sustainable food and reduce our footprint. Coen explained how animal models are an important tool in this process, enabling us to simulate the impact of changes in diet formulations, feed programs and other sustainability metrics on animal performance and a farm’s environmental footprint to help farmers make decisions that benefit their operations while also helping safeguard the planet.
Livestock farming is facing many challenges to meet the current and future demands of sustainable food systems. Functional feed ingredients and feeds with benefits beyond their nutritional value are pivotal for sustainable farming and offer a wide range of possibilities to support animal health, reduce our impact on the climate and environment, and increase the circularity of the food system to limit competition between resources for feed or food.
Wageningen University’s Functional ingredients for sustainable animal nutrition chair, established in October 2023 within the University’s Animal Nutrition group, is focused on education and development in the field of functional ingredients for sustainable animal nutrition, to explore how we can reduce environmental footprints, increase the circular use of raw materials and support animal health.
