8 June 2022

3 minute read

By: Rick Purnell

Mycotoxins exist in multiple materials that make up livestock and poultry feed formulations. Nienke de Groot, veterinarian and strategic marketing director for Trouw Nutrition, addressed how to use analyses of the risks of specific mycotoxins to select a mycotoxin binder in a Tech Talk during the 2022 IPPE. She shared highlights with The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell before her presentation.

“Mycotoxins are existent in a lot of raw materials and in final feed formulations,” said de Groot. “What we do as a company is to analyze the risk. We do a risk-based analysis of the raw materials of the complete feed. We use this little machine here. It’s called the Mycomaster. It’s a very compact machine. You can put it anywhere in the feed mill or where the raw materials come in and easily analyze the raw material for many types of mycotoxins.”

de Groot added that an analysis from the Mycomaster can then be incorporated in Trouw Nutritions’ program called NutriOpt, which takes the analysis of the risk of mycotoxins and provides a recommendation on which type and dosage of mycotoxin binder to use.

“This means that the product you use is effective for the risk that is actually in the feed or in the raw materials,” she said. “That makes it the most economic option so that you’re not overdosing or not using the highest-spectrum mycotoxin binder, but if you’re at a low risk, it means you have the adequate use of product in the right moment. In this tool, we also have risk analysis in time, risk analysis based on season and risk analysis based on rainfall in different countries. It’s a very extensive tool that can give you a risk analysis based on the species that you have, based on the raw material you use and based on the mycotoxin level that is in that raw material you’re using.”

If this approach seems prescriptive, de Groot would concur. She said that Trouw Nutrition does its best to personalize offerings for each customer.

“What we normally do is analyze the quality of the raw material, analyze the quality of the feed the customer is using by using the NutriOpt platform, we can really adapt the feed formulation according to the quality of the products or the quality of the raw material that a customer is using,” de Groot said. “That, I think, is our expertise and strength as a company to really work on that personalization. We basically see every customer as a different case.”

This process gives a producer an accurate look at a risk situation. Using the Mycomaster machine combined with the NutriOpt program will develop a real time blueprint of a situation, the materials being used and provide in-depth insight to the risks at hand.

“We see people using this to determine the inclusion of the products, determine the quality of the raw material coming in and sometimes, even to reject incoming raw material because the risk is too high,” said de Groot. There are many options to use and with the two platforms you can see all of the risks based in time and all of the risks in the different countries is giving them more insights in the risk analyses they have for different species.”