Animal feed is one of the main costs in animal production. Therefore, any performance improvement that will come from the feed or from nutrition gives a competitive advantage.
As such, a feed mill is a rather simple process that feed producers know and master. To put it in simple terms, the recipe is prepared in a big kitchen blender. As a very standardized industrial process, the focus, for a given quality specification is to produce at the lowest cost possible. So, has feed become a commodity or are there ways of offering added value to farmers?
You can look at this at two levels: the feed itself and its usage.
Feed manufacturing itself can be incorporated in the production chain in different ways that will all have the same purpose: cutting cost. The feed company can be independent and market its own feed, or it can just produce as toll milling for a farmer or processing group, as this is already the case.
However, the true added value lies somewhere else: innovation. This plays already today and will increasingly be the strategic area of the future for feed companies. Innovation will continue to cover many areas, from biology, nutrition, to feed technology with the purposes of further improving feed efficiency, and provide raw materials that are more efficient.
In an age where availability of raw materials will become scarce, because of the competition between animal nutrition, human nutrition and possibly demand for biofuels, everything that will help saving and recycling resources will win. To achieve this, we will see new techniques to increase the digestibility of feed, to reduce the feed conversion ratio and create less manure, as well as improvement of the texture and other physical qualities of the feeds. We will see further innovations in the feed composition in order to have the animal use most of it, and for instance the use of enzymes will increase further. Other developments, such as a promising sesame seed extract that can help replicate omega-3 fatty acids in fish feed, can help reduce the dependence on scarce (and expensive) fish oil, and offer substitution possibilities with more types of vegetal oil. However, in this case fish would compete with other farm animals and humans for those oils, making them more expensive in the end. There is also the development of algae as a feedstuffs for farm animals. If successful will such algae be produced in ponds on in the sea, or will it  remain an incubator-based production? Who knows? But expect many new ideas to come to the market, as the fight for resources will become fiercer in the future.
Companies that will possess the latest scientific and technical knowledge, combined with a strong innovative capacity and the talent to locate and purchase the very best mix of raw materials will in fact own intellectual property. Nothing of the above is new, but the future changes will have more to do with the allocation of the different activities in the feed value chain itself. This intellectual property is what they might need to sell in the future, instead of a feed that customers do not always perceive as a differentiated product. Feed and nutrition might become two distinct products and maybe even distinct businesses. Could feed mills become franchises of nutrition and feed technology centers?

Copyright 2009 The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.