Several major properties of livestock and poultry feed additives

　　Feed additives refer to small or trace amounts of substances added to feed during processing, production, and use in order to achieve a certain purpose, including nutritional feed additives and general feed additives, and the general term for substances added to feed in small doses. Currently and in the foreseeable future, the development and production of feed additives will exhibit the following five major trends.

　　1. The comprehensive functionality of feed additives

　　With the improvement of people's living standards, new special requirements have been put forward for animal products, such as the color, meat quality, taste, and health functions of livestock and poultry products. Most of these requirements can be achieved through the functions of feed additives. Therefore, the functionalization of feed additives is also a major direction for future development. The purpose of using additives is to promote growth and other types of production performance, such as increasing egg production rate, hatching rate, and feed utilization efficiency; Improve the health status of livestock and poultry. There are many types of feed additives, including additives used to supplement nutrients such as amino acids, inorganic salts, trace elements, vitamins, etc; Non nutritional additives used to promote animal health, growth, or meet special requirements for feed processing; In addition, adding medicinal feed products that prevent and treat diseases to feed is called feed drug additives. Feed additives have the functions of improving the nutrition of feed, increasing the utilization rate of feed, promoting animal growth and preventing diseases, reducing the loss of nutrients during feed storage, etc. Feed additives are an indispensable part of feed.

　　Functional additives refer to additives that enter animal bodies through feed and exert certain biological functions. They can be divided into growth regulators, immune regulators, feeding regulators, metabolic regulators, livestock product quality regulators, and microecological regulators.

　　The main function of growth regulators is to regulate, improve, and promote growth, or to stabilize body weight and maintain physical condition under certain conditions. In most cases, their role is to enhance growth.

　　There are several types of immune modulators, including polysaccharides from plants and oligosaccharides; Proteins include antibodies, amino acids, and small peptides; Lipids include unsaturated fatty acids; Nucleic acids include nucleotides; Trace nutrients include mineral elements and vitamins; Plant extracts include ketones, glycosides, and so on.

　　The direction of food intake regulation is to increase and control food intake, and its regulatory mechanism is achieved through neural, endocrine, chemical, and physical regulation.

　　Microecology mainly refers to the internal environment of the intestine, which is influenced by many factors, including the morphology and structure of the digestive tract, the composition of digestive fluids, the physicochemical properties of chyme, pH value, temperature, microbial flora, microbial metabolites, etc. These elements are collectively referred to as the microecological environment. Any substance that can regulate the microecological environment is called a microecological regulator.

　　Livestock product quality regulators can affect the quality of livestock products, including nutrition, genetics, disease control, feeding management, and processing techniques.

　　2. The effectiveness of feed additives

　　There are many types of feed additives, but the application of each type of feed additive must have a certain practical effect on the specific target audience. If feed additives have no effect on the target audience and the effect is not significant, do not use them. For example, when the amino acids in the feed ingredient formula are already comprehensive and balanced, there is no need to use amino acid feed additives anymore.

　　Nutritional feed additives refer to small or trace amounts of substances added to feed to supplement its nutritional components, including feed grade amino acids, vitamins, mineral trace elements, enzyme preparations, non protein nitrogen, etc. Although livestock and poultry have a very small need for these ingredients, they are essential for their growth, development, and normal production. Due to the inability or insufficient synthesis in animal bodies, such substances must be supplied by feed.

　　Pre mixed feed is the abbreviation for additive pre mixed feed, which is an intermediate type of compound feed product made by mixing one or more trace components (including various trace mineral elements, vitamins, synthetic amino acids, certain drugs and other additives) with diluents or carriers according to the required ratio and uniform mixing. Premixed feed is an important component of full price compound feed.

　　Microbial feed additives can inhibit the proliferation of harmful bacteria and maintain a balance in the gut microbiota; Inhibit and prevent the proliferation of harmful bacteria in the intestine, allowing beneficial bacteria to dominate.

　　Feed vitamins play a significant role in promoting the growth of livestock and poultry, improving their immune system, reducing disease incidence, and saving feed. According to statistics, feed vitamins account for over 60% of the world's total vitamin intake. In addition, various enzymes in the raw materials also have a certain impact on vitamins and stability.

　　3. The convenience and flexibility of feed additives

　　General feed additives refer to small or trace amounts of substances added to feed to ensure or improve feed quality and increase feed utilization. Due to differences in animal species, seasonal and weather changes, regional variations, environmental differences, animal health conditions, and other factors, the formula should also vary. In the future, feed additives should be closer to and more convenient for practical production applications. Therefore, micro and pre mixing are also directions for the development of feed additives in the future.

　　4. Compatibility of feed additives

　　Feed additives are various trace components added to compound feed, including vitamins, trace elements, amino acids, growth promoters, antibiotics, antioxidants, mold inhibitors, enzyme preparations, emulsifiers, hormones, sedatives, drug additives, and buffering agents. These numerous different varieties and additives with different physical and chemical properties have different roles in feed and livestock growth and production.

　　Feed additives are generally made by pre mixing and diluting two or more raw materials. From a chemical perspective, if two feed additives are mixed together and affect their respective analytical recovery rates, then these two feed additives have compatibility restrictions and cannot be used simultaneously; If mixing two feed additives together does not affect their respective analytical recovery rates, then these two feed additives are compatible and can be used simultaneously. From the analysis of the effects of additives, if two additives are used together and have an antagonistic effect on each other, their effects weaken or disappear, then there is a compatibility taboo between these two feed additives; If two feed additives are used together and their effectiveness is not affected or even improved, then these two feed additives are compatible. Due to the fact that many feed quality issues arise from unreasonable compatibility of pharmaceutical additives, special attention should be paid to the compatibility taboos between pharmaceutical additives in the design of feed additive premix formulas, and they should be avoided as much as possible. The preparation and use of feed additives must have scientific basis and strictly comply with the "Guidelines for the Use of Feed Drug Additives".

　　5. The safety of feed additives

　　Feed additives are mainly used to protect the nutrients in feed, promote digestion and absorption of nutrients, regulate body metabolism, enhance livestock and poultry health, improve the efficiency of nutrient utilization, improve livestock and poultry production level, and enhance the quality of livestock and poultry products, thereby improving livestock and poultry production performance, reducing production costs, and becoming an indispensable component of full price compound feed.

　　In the food chain of feed additives, livestock, and humans, feed additives are the most fundamental and important link. Through biological enrichment, certain chemical components in feed additives will gradually accumulate in the human body, becoming an important factor affecting human health. So feed additives are indirect food for humans, and the safety of feed additives determines the safety of livestock and poultry products, and is closely related to people's physical health, thus receiving widespread attention from society.

　　Unsafe and excessive use of feed additives can cause harm: according to common sense, feed additives should at least meet the three basic requirements of safety, effectiveness, and non polluting the environment. Among the many factors that affect feed safety, the use of prohibited drugs and excessive antibiotics poses a particularly serious threat. Therefore, stricter regulations and firm enforcement are needed. In addition, developing new feed additives and improving formula feed are also very important. Ecological feed additives have no drug residues, no drug resistance, and do not pollute the environment. In production, they mainly include functional oligosaccharides, bioactive peptides, microecological preparations, Chinese herbal preparations, enzyme preparations, acidifiers, and organic trace elements.