A story at the start of the year got your attention, and set you sharing on social media.
Cargill opened what it called one of the biggest premix plants globally - it is located in Lewisburg, Ohio.
The factory has heightened focus on safety and precision, ensuring no-cross contamination and enabling accuracy in micronutrient dosing, down to the gram level. Those were the fundamental goals of the new operation.
The facility can also cater to customer demand for tailored feed formulations to back up product claims.
There is always a lot of excitement around insect protein developments, and our review of Rabobank's insights into the growth prospects for insect protein 10 years down the road was shared widely.
The analysts reckon demand for such novel protein sources in feed and pet food applications could reach the 500,000 tons level by that juncture.
Rabobank also highlighted the significant growth potential for the sector that value-added components could bring.
Photo credit: GettyImages/Jonathan Kitchen
A story on how EU retailers were getting worked up about new plant breeding techniques and an EU legislative review saw plenty of posts on social media sites.
The supermarkets, in a joint letter, called for products derived from new genetic engineering processes to be classified as GMOs.
Photo credit: GettyImages/Yuuji
Still on the EU legislative front, and readers were actively posting about our piece in August on the green light given for the use of processed animal proteins or PAPs in poultry and pig feed.
The likely constraints on the growth of this PAP market due to the need for dedicated feed mills were also flagged by industry sources in that story.
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A story, first published in November 2020, was still doing the rounds on social media networks this year.
It reported on a new fish-free feed developed in a trial by a team based at University of California, Santa Cruz. The feed was said to demonstrate across-the-board gains in sustainability, performance, economic viability, and human health.
“This is a potential gamechanger for shifting aquaculture to more sustainable practices,” said Pallab Sarker, lead researcher.
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There is always heightened reader interest in news about how waste materials can be transformed to valued added feed ingredients.
This story, published in February this year, concerns a research project underway in the UK to determine if nutrients produced from anaerobic digestion of farm and food waste could be used to cultivate algal biomass for feed and other applications.
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An article on the growth plans of an Asian insect protein developer, published in March, was also shared widely.
Tom Berry, co-CEO of Singapore-based Nutrition Technologies, laid out the picture for us:
“This is the first large-scale insect protein factory in Southeast Asia, growing over 3 trillion bugs at any one time, to produce sustainable proteins for the animal feed sector. We run an environmentally sustainable zero-waste facility where all our bugs are fed on factory food waste that is diverted from landfills."
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2021 has been marked by a supply chain crisis; the year saw pandemic related spiraling freight costs and shipping delays coupled with an energy crunch.
This story, from October, reflects those developments and garnered your attention.
Photo credit: GettyImages/Luis Alvarez
Green Plains has been transforming its business over the past few years.
A story in March peaked your interest. It demonstrated how the US company had reached a milestone in terms of its protein production goals.
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There was lots of reaction on Twitter to this piece on EU legislation in relation to commodities and their deforestation risk.
It was published late last month.
Stakeholders stressed the importance of curbing the issue in origin countries, not legislating to clean up domestic supply chains.
Photo credit: GettyImages/Richard Drury
