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On Friday October 12th 2012, Lallemand Animal Nutrition held its Fourth S.c. boulardii International Technical meeting in Noordwijk aan Zee, in the Netherlands. Once again, close to 150 swine professionals from around the world (at least 25 countries were represented!) were keen to accept the invitation to learn and discuss with internationally renowned experts around key issues of today’s swine nutrition: feed efficiency and functional traits in sows and piglets.
The meeting was shared between two major topics: sows nutrition, and post-weaning piglet nutrition, linking state of the art basic science to more practical discussions. As Yannig Le Treut highlighted it in his introduction, with today’s soaring raw material prices, feed efficiency has become a key issue in animal nutrition. Feed efficiency is defined as the amount of feed necessary to produce one kg of meat, in other worlds it represents the efficiency of the transformation of feed into meat: the less the better! Today, we have the scientific proofs that the use of the live yeast S.c. boulardii I-1079 in sow’s diet enhances fermentations in the hindgut, increasing the amount of energy that can be extracted from the feed. Hence, it represents a good tool to improve the efficacy of our transformation system, with added benefits on the sow’s health and comfort. In the case of piglets, weaning represents a major stress factor, strongly impacting their immune and digestive health (the data concerning the impact f weaning on the piglet microflora diversity and richness by Dr. Mellits were impressive!). The various data presented indicate that S. c. Boulardii I-1079 is also a good tool to help mitigate the impact of weaning stress in piglets.
The aim of this meeting was to summarize and share up-to-date research results on S.c. boulardii I-1079 in swine, but also to provide some fundamental knowledge on current issues of swine health, such as endotoxins, MMA or nutrition modelling, which are pre-requisite to the usage of the probiotic yeast S.c. boulardii I-1079 in swine feed design.
November 6, 2012 - Lallemand
