Our interview with McDonalds at Feed Protein Vision 2018 tops the charts. Nicola Robinson, senior manager on the fast food giant's global sustainability team, told us about the research the corporation is carrying out in conjunction with Cargill into the use of both insect derived and seaweed sourced protein as substitutes for soybean meal in chicken production.
In our video story with the second highest traffic ranking, Sara Giradello, analyst with LMC International, discusses the incentives, or lack thereof, for farmers to grow soybeans with higher protein content, and how ongoing expansion in the aquaculture sector might be the driver needed for such a development.
Scott Fry, director of technical sales support, Micronutrients told us at IPPE in January about the research the company had been doing to explore the interaction of different types of copper sources with added, fat-soluble vitamins in feed. That story came in third in our most popular video rankings.
In another interview from Feed Protein Vision 2018, Margareth Øverland, professor in nutrition at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) questioned whether we should be using human food to feed animals in the future, in light of climatic changes and limited availability of agricultural land. She told us that microbial feed resources, such as those produced using natural gas, have an advantage in that they can be produced independently of arable land and climate, and they relieve pressure on food resources for direct human food production.
Wendy Rauw, research scientist, INIA in Spain, in our fifth most popular video story so far this year, noted how livestock production is moving towards an increased use of local feedstuffs.
Rauw is coordinating SusPig, an three-year EU funded project evaluating whether it is possible to improve the overall sustainability of European pig production when animals are fed diets based on local feedstuffs including co-products like DDGS, legumes and rapeseed meal.