Stress can affect your body, your thoughts and feelings, and your behavior. Stress causes our cortisol levels to rise. Cortisol can cause food cravings, usually for high carbohydrate or sweet foods. Not only do many people turn to food as a comfort during stressful times, they also tend to consume more highly refined carbohydrates like white pasta, bread, rice, bagels, chips, crackers, baked goods and other sweets. Although these foods may provide quick and immediate comfort, the more of them we eat, the worse our mood gets. High intake of these foods leads to crashes that may increase susceptibility to new stress. After a spike in blood sugar caused by eating a large amount of highly refined carbohydrates, it’s common to experience mental fog, tiredness, anxiety and irritability, all of which may exacerbate existing stress.

Cortisol also activates an enzyme in our fat cells. Visceral fat cells – the fat found around vital organs in our abdomen – have significantly more of these enzymes than subcutaneous fat – the fat just below the skin on other areas of the body like legs and buttocks – which is why stress causes belly fat accumulation. The more stress a person has, the more abdominal obesity can occur, which is linked to a greater risk for heart disease and diabetes.

Luckily, there are other components of food that can help regulate stress by providing specific nutrients or sustained energy.

Better mood foods

DHA omega-3

This essential fatty acid has been studied for its positive effects on mood and protection of our brain against chronic stress. Increasing dietary intake of DHA omega-3 may help prevent the harmful effects of chronic stress and the development of stress-related disorders such as depression and anxiety.

Better Mood Foods: DHA-enriched eggs, meat and milk, salmon, mackerel and sardines

Zinc

Diets low in zinc have been linked to anxiety and depression. A daily intake is required, as our body doesn’t have a zinc storage system.

Better Mood Foods: oysters, beef, crab, lobster, chicken, turkey, beans and nuts

Magnesium

This mineral has been called “the original chill pill” for its role in regulating cortisol levels and its ability to prevent the entrance of stress hormones to the brain.

Better Mood Foods: spinach, whole grains, legumes, potatoes, avocados, nuts and seeds

Vitamin B6

An important function of vitamin B6 is helping to produce serotonin and norephinephrine, both of which positively influence mood.

Better Mood Foods: chickpeas, tuna, salmon, chicken and turkey

Whole grains

Both simple (white bread and pasta, bagels, baked goods, etc.) and complex (whole grain bread and pasta, oatmeal, etc.) carbohydrates are turned into glucose, a type of sugar used as fuel by the body. However, complex carbohydrates contain vitamins, minerals and fiber that slow the release of glucose into the blood stream, providing the body a steady supply of energy, as well as serotonin, a “feel good” chemical.

Better Mood Foods: oatmeal, brown rice, whole grain bread and pasta, quinoa and popcorn

“The judicious use and reduction of antibiotics in poultry production is here to stay,” said Dr. Kayla Price, poultry technical manager for Alltech Canada, in a recent webinar.

In the last few years, we have seen an influx of products being marketed as alternatives to antibiotics. This can leave producers wondering, “How do I choose between the numerous alternatives on the market?” “Is there a direct replacement for antibiotics?” and “What should be my biggest focus to maintain healthy birds?” In the webinar titled “Navigating the new world: Phasing out antibiotic growth promoters,” Price shares her insights on these questions and more.

“I think it is really important when we are starting to look at general bird health that we make sure we are taking on a holistic approach,” she explained. “Specifically, we really have to think of the intestinal system from hatch to finish.”

In the webinar, Price discusses:

• An overview of the market for antibiotic-free poultry production in the United States and Canada.
• How to support the beneficial gut bacteria and maintain the health of the villi/microvilli.
• A list of key questions to ask when deciding on an alternative to antibiotics.
• What benefits a holistic program can bring.

Price highlights that there is not one silver bullet solution for the removal of antibiotics; nutrition and biosecurity are both crucial to ensure success.

There is a global movement to reduce antimicrobial use in livestock production. Antimicrobials have historically been, and are still, used extensively to address gut health issues in piglets, and a major challenge is finding alternatives to antimicrobials in order to support the gut during the period when it is developing. The goal to reduce antimicrobial use should be modified and instead viewed as a goal to produce healthy production systems that support the animal in all stages of production.

In-feed prophylactic antibiotic use in pig production is not used to treat sick pigs — it is used to treat suboptimal production systems. In the Alltech Antibiotic Reduction programme, the first step is therefore to optimise the health of the production system, which will make systematic prophylactic use redundant. Such an approach will not result in increased disease and loss in productivity; on the contrary, productivity will most likely increase, and the reduced expenditures on antibiotics can be invested in other areas in order to optimize the overall welfare and health of the pigs.

A healthy gut is key to a healthy animal, and, increasingly, emphasis is being placed on optimising gut health in our production animals. A healthy gut is not only a gut without disease; a healthy gut is an effective digestive organ that can mount a good defence against disease and easily cope with change. Immunity is the body’s internal defence against pathogens. The presence of disease-causing microorganisms in the gut is not sufficient to cause disease; disease occurs once the pathogen breaks down the gut’s defence. When the gut commensal microflora is out of balance, dysbiosis occurs between the beneficial microbiota and potential disease-causing organisms, and it becomes easier for pathogens to damage the gut’s structures and functions. Prebiotics, probiotics and mannan-oligosaccharides can assist the gut in adapting and minimising dysbiosis.

The establishment and maintenance of good gut function are vitally important in reducing neonatal morbidity and mortality. Neonatal nutrition is a critical component in the establishment of normal gut function, from digestion and absorption to barrier function and the development of the immune system. It is therefore important to ensure good colostrum and milk production in sows as well as good creep feeding.

Weaning disorders are one of the most common, and damaging, problems in pig husbandry, resulting in antibiotics being used post-weaning to protect the stressed gut and immune systems of the piglets. In a healthy production system, it is essential to do everything possible in order to help prepare the piglet for weaning as early as in the farrowing unit. Furthermore, at the time of weaning, it is important to minimise stressors such as transport, comingling of litters, large weaner groups, diet, poor air quality and unhygienic conditions.

Mycotoxins are toxins produced from moulds that cause serious health problems in pig production and can result in severe economic losses worldwide. Due to current climatic conditions and production systems with long distribution chains of feed, the risks associated with mycotoxins in feed and bedding material are high. Intestinal cells are the first cells to be exposed to mycotoxins, and often at higher concentrations than other tissues. Mycotoxins specifically target cells, such as gut epithelium, that have a high protein turnover and protein-activated cells. In order to improve the overall health status of the herd, appropriate measures need to be taken to minimise the exposure of pigs to mycotoxins, particularly in terms of feed storage, feed sourcing and the inclusion of good broad-spectrum mycotoxin binders in the feed.

The aim of the Alltech Antibiotic Reduction programme is to create a consistently healthy pig and make prophylactic and metaphylaxis antibiotic use redundant. This programme can assist the farmer in developing an action plan. Various feed additives and nutritional solutions are valuable tools for gut health in pig production, but these supplements alone are not sufficient for a healthy production system. Many times, there are more difficult steps that must be taken than simply feeding additives, including updates to management routines and resource allocation and needs.

The programme is for pig producers who are interested in achieving higher levels of health in their herd and are committed to taking steps to achieve these goals. Audits to establish the baseline current situation and recurrent audits to monitor progress are important in order to stay motivated and continue a steady rate of progress. The Alltech team assesses the weaknesses and strengths of the production system and sets up an action plan. In addition to gut health and nutrition components, the Alltech Antibiotic Reduction programme audits include evaluations of performance, pig welfare, pig respiratory and systemic health, reproductive performance, management, housing, antimicrobial use, biosecurity and the cost-effectiveness of production. Recommendations include nutritional solutions, management, antimicrobial use strategy, biosecurity measures, reproductive performance and productivity goals in order to optimise pig health at all stages of production. Through this program, producers have not only achieved increased productivity and reduced antibiotic use, but have also found it rewarding to be part of the global action plan to use our valuable antibiotics responsibly in order to ensure their viability for future generations.

To find out more about the Alltech Antibiotic Reduction programme, please visit go.alltech.com/antibiotic-reduction.

Alltech's Dr. Aoife Lyons is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in children, brain development and ADHD. In this interview, she discussed with David Butler the importance of docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, and its role in brain function and development. Dr. Lyons highlighted some of the exciting new research that is being done to examine the connection between DHA, sleep quality and attention span in children. We also discussed the pros and cons of fish oil versus algae as a source of DHA.

A transcript of the interview follows:

This is David Butler for Alltech, and I’m here with Dr. Aoife Lyons. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, please?

I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, and my specialty is in children and brain development. I ran a children’s clinic in Chicago for about 14 years where we saw all sorts of children. Many had Attention Deficit Disorder, which is more commonly known as ADHD, and we saw a lot of learning disabilities as well.

How long have you been with Alltech?

I have been with Alltech as a consultant for about 12 years, full-time now for about two years.

Very good. Tell us a little about omega-3 fatty acids and why they are important.

Well, DHA, or those fatty acids that you are talking about, are really, really important to support central nervous systems. Your central nervous system is in charge of your brain. It’s in charge of executive functioning, which is things like time management, being able to organize your time, being able to prioritize, having impulse control, things like this. It’s very, very important in children to have DHA to support that brain development, which is happening so rapidly. Also, it’s really important to have DHA through the lifetime, in particular in old age. There is a lot of literature out there that shows supplementation with DHA helps support memory function in patients with Alzheimer’s.

So, you talk about DHA and omega-3’s. I think it can be kind of confusing for people when they are looking for supplements and thinking about their diet. What is the difference?

Oftentimes when you go to Whole Foods or another health food store, you will see omega-3 fatty acids, and those are coming from fish oil, but when we think about where did the fish get their oil to begin with, it’s from algae. The more pure form of DHA would be from that algae. Alltech has several algae facilities that we’re developing at this point and lots of different uses that we are hoping for. My interest, of course, is in the cognitive development of children. I thought, wow, Alltech is doing this research with DHA and algae, how can we bridge the gap between what Alltech offers scientifically and what my personal interests are, which is in the health of children.

There is a lot of research into the importance of DHA, of course, and I’m sure that you have read several studies on it. What are the current focus areas, and what are some of the results?

Interestingly enough, most of the studies have been in 2012 and 2013, so this is really a cutting edge in terms of scientific research, into psychology and interbrain development. One study did supplementation through about 300 mg of DHA in children for 16 weeks, and then they asked the parents and the teachers, before and after, to rate the children on different behaviors, such as impulsivity, concentration, attention, these sorts of things. They did see improvement in children after the 16 weeks of supplementation.

What is more interesting is that for children with learning disabilities, it seems like the effects of DHA are greater than just more typically developing children. People say, why is this? Again, this is really cutting-edge research. It’s all very very new. There is one interesting study, I believe it was in 2013, that looked at children’s sleep cycles and children with ADHD in particular. They found for all children, supplementation with the DHA for this 16-week cycle, they hooked them up to sleep machines and the whole thing, and what they found is that children were getting on average 57-58 more minutes of sleep per night. Now, this does not mean that the children were in bed for almost an hour more per night. It just meant that they had less episodes of waking up during the night. And then they looked at the children’s attention after the supplementation, and they found that the attention and also their academic skills had improved.

Sometimes people will say to me, of course academic skills are going to improve after about four months, of course we’re going to expect reading to be better, and I think something that most people wouldn’t realize is that the tests that we give children, the psychological and academic tests, they are normed to the month so that children who are 7 years, 1 month old, would be compared to children who are 7 years, 1 month. So a child then who is 7 years, 5 months, is compared to other children of the exact same age. So, when we see improvement in reading, it is a true improvement.

That sounds like a pretty dramatic difference. Almost an hour of extra quality sleep, and I’m sure anybody that has kids knows that they're easier to get along with if they have better sleep. So what is the next step?

Well, again, this is very new research, and a lot of the studies that have been done were done in England. There hasn’t been a lot of literature coming out of the US yet. Small-scale studies, specific to schools or to clinical groups, maybe in a pediatrician’s clinic. What we need are larger-scale studies so we can piece out what exactly is going on with the DHA supplementation and the improved academics and the improved attention. I think that increased knowledge in the public about the benefits of DHA, exactly what it does in the brain to support the central nervous system development, is really important.

You know, when you think about it, we’re saying fish oil, and it could have easily been called snake oil many years ago. So I think educating the public is important, so that they are more on board in terms of having their children take part in these sorts of studies. I know for myself, I am taking the fish oil. I know whenever I had researchers Becky Timmons, she takes a lot of fish oil. Her daughter also took fish oil when she was studying for her law school exams.

So I think the larger-scale studies will be important, and I would love to see cross-cultural studies. I would love to see if children, say, in Japan, where the diet is more heavily based on fish, see if those children have better attention and concentration than the U.S. children, and is that due to their diet, or is that due to the cultural reasons and expectations that parents have for their child’s behavior?

Do you have any plans for your own research coming up?

Well, I do, actually. I would love to do another study. A lot of those studies that have been done have been using omega-3 fish oil. I would love to do a study that is just looking at the DHA, just at the algae. We have plans that are underway. We are just in the very early stages at this point. I would love to do a larger scale study with DHA from algae supplementation in a bigger group of school children with the same model as some of the other studies that have been done, but a bigger group of children so we can piece out, does this work for all children? Does this work with kids with ADHD? Does it work better with kids with learning disabilities? So there is a lot of research that can be done. I’m to the point where I have found a couple of schools that are interested in this project, but it wouldn’t get underway until probably a year from now.

Let’s suppose that you have two routes for supplementing the DHA and you could either take fish oil or you could take algae. If you had an equal quantity of DHA either way, would there still be advantages to algae? Why would that be preferable over fish oil?

Well, in terms of doing research with children, there are all sorts of methodological things that you have to think about. Taking the fish oil capsules is not exactly a pleasant thing, sometimes if you haven’t had breakfast it can make you feel a little sick to your stomach, but we do know that there are some gummy bear algae based DHA products available out there, so that would be one way to go. Try to make it a treat for the kid.

If we’re trying to increase the number of people that are improving their diet with DHA, would algae or fish oil be more sustainable method for that?

It’s a lot more sustainable to grow a lot of algae than it is to grow the algae to feed the fish to farm the fish. It’s kind of just going to the source instead of taking it one more step.

And it also doesn’t taste like fish.

Correct.

Thank you very much, and good luck with your research. I hope we have the chance to talk to you about that soon.

An interview with David Hunt

The following is an edited transcript of our interview with David Hunt, CEO and co-founder of Cainthus. Cainthus is a machine-vision company specializing in health analytics for crop and livestock.

Tell us a little bit about why digitizing agriculture is important and what the potential is.

How we got into all of this is, we looked at what was going on in the agriculture world. My brother and I got extremely concerned about how, if we keep on farming in our “green revolution” style agriculture of monocultures plus chemical input, we are effectively going to kill our planet. We realized that we need to make things far more efficient, and farm in more environmentally friendly ways, in order to stave off what currently looks like an inevitability at the moment.

We then said, “What’s the best way to go about doing this?” Despite coming from an agriculture background, I didn’t realize the sheer absence of measurement that was at the commercial field or commercial livestock level. We realized if you want to improve agriculture, first of all you need to start measuring things. Then, once you can measure things, you can work out how to improve them and then ultimately that will hopefully lead to a better system.

I am very much a science fiction fan, and one of the things that always excited me as a child was the concept of robots working in farms and fields. When we started out on this journey, it was all toward the view of what we needed to do to get robots into our fields. One of the things we found out was, a robot is actually only as good as the data that feeds it. If you have an absence of data and an absence of measurement in agriculture, then the robots are never going to be there.

My personal opinion is, we will never be able to move away from monocultures until we have on-demand precision harvesting, which probably needs to be performed by robots, given the cost in increased human labor. When we went looking at what was the best way to systematically capture commercial field scale data in a manner that would be affordable to the farmer, we couldn’t get beyond the fact that digital imaging was going to be the way to do it. Camera technology is increasing at an exponential level at the moment. We only just got HD TVs and they are talking about 4K TVs, ultra HD, 8K TVs, etc. It’s that technology, and how cheap it is becoming, that’s enabling us to use drones to get highly precise images of what’s going on in our fields, far beyond the capability of what we can see with the human eye. One of the big concepts that I think people on farms need to understand, particularly crop farms, when it comes to drones: The drone is incidental and is simply the best current delivery device we have for getting one centimeter per pixel resolution, which is the minimum requirement in my opinion to spot what’s going on in a farm.

Tell me about some of the ways that you want to take that visual information. What would be the practical application? What are some of the things you have in mind?

Stand counts are something very useful we can do today. One of the biggest decisions a farmer makes every year is when they plant a field and the crops start emerging. If areas in the field do not emerge, well, what do I do about it? When you can count every individual plant in a field, you can make a data-driven decision as to whether it makes financial sense to re-sow or simply do nothing. I know enough farmers to know how difficult it is for a farmer to sit on their hands and do nothing when they are looking at a big bare patch in the middle of their field. Financially speaking, when it comes to your profit margin, it may actually be the best decision to simply do nothing. Introducing data-driven decision to agriculture, via increased digital measurement, is what enables you to do things like that.

Another application we have: Crop maturity analytics is something we can do today. The whole point of that is, when you ask farmers when they harvest their fields, it is generally they are afraid of bad weather coming, so they are going to harvest before the bad weather. If they see the neighbor out or the local agronomist tells them to do it, very little of it is based on data. I heard Aidan Connolly make a great point that today we farm based on what we see happening in our fields or what we see happening with our animals. Increasingly, as agriculture becomes more digitized, we are going to start farming data. We will look at what the data feedback is coming off our farm, and we will be making decisions on our farming activity based on that.

You talked about the importance of getting to a sustainable form of agriculture. What are some of the problems that we have, the way we are farming currently? What’s the potential risk for not dealing with it?

The potential risk of not dealing with it is our planet dies. That doesn’t mean humans will go extinct or anything like that; it just means that this planet won’t be a very nice place to live. Elon Musk is doing everything he can to get to Mars, but I’m not sure that’s going to be much nicer.

When we look at the principal risks that can be dealt with by using digital technologies, number one is our out-of-control nitrogen cycle. Currently, we are spending $140 billion dollars annually on nitrogen fertilizer. Depending on the target plant, 17 to 26 percent of that is being used by the target plant and the rest is being taken up by weeds, getting locked into the soil, or going as runoff into our waterways. We have an inefficiency loop in terms of our nitrogen fertilizer. The difficulty with that in terms of an environmental perspective is, unfortunately, nitrogen fertilizer does a lot of damage to our soil. We are in a situation where we’re putting in more and more fertilizer to get the same results. The only way we are going to break out of that vicious cycle is by getting technology that allows us to apply fertilizer and other chemical inputs on-demand when appropriate to do so, as opposed to just doing blanket hit-and-hope spraying as we do today.

Will the application in the future be more directly just to the plant’s root system, or do you think there will be more ways to deliver it more efficiently so it’s not covering the whole field?

I really can’t see beyond using robotic applications. DJI Drones has already released a robotic sprayer that can spray sixty acres per hour at $15,000. One of the things we can do is spot very early where there is a problem in your field. Then you identify the problem, and you can send in your precision sprayer to spray the area in the field when it is only impacting a couple of square meters, as opposed to having to spray the entire field when you see it with your own eyes.

How do you visually, with a camera, determine where you need nitrogen? I would assume that’s based on plant growth or color?

Nitrogen application is not something we can do with visual technology today in a manner that is affordable to a farmer. The best sort of sensor tech to use, to identify where you need nitrogen, is hyperspectral. That is way too expensive to be using at farm level currently. The other thing is, if you do decide to spend the money on something like hyperspectral and look at it at the start of the year, that is only so useful, because your requirements are going to change throughout the growing season. For technology to actually make a meaningful impact, it needs to be cheap enough that you can use it consistently throughout the growing season so you can apply inputs as and when needed by the plant.

How will you make It cheaper?

If you look at RGB cameras, which are like the cameras in your smartphone or a normal camera, they are getting incredibly cheap, incredibly quickly. Again, so cheap that you have a camera included in your smartphone for free that a professional photographer would have killed for ten years ago. Hyperspectral is the same; the underlying drivers of the cost of that technology are the same for RGB. The reason hyperspectral is so expensive is that an RGB camera looks at three spectra, red, green and blue, and hyperspectral looks at two hundred spectra. Your underlying data cost is obviously a large multiple of the cost associated with an RGB camera, not to mention the cost of the sensor itself.

I think you mentioned, aside from the nitrogen cycle, two other big issues with agriculture. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Number one, we really need to stop using pesticides as much as we do, because obviously that indiscriminately kills all sorts of things, not just the target pest species. Also, we need to stop farming in monocultures. As I said, one of the technologies we have already developed is precision. We can spot on a grain-by-grain basis when a crop is mature and ready to be harvested. When you can do precision on-demand harvesting, that will enable you to get away from your combine harvester green revolution paradigm, where you have to harvest an entire field in a couple of hours. If you can plant many different species of plants in one field and harvest them on demand when appropriate, that’s a far more environmentally friendly way to farm. In theory, it should also be a more profitable way for a farmer to farm. They are not beholden to the commodity markets in an individual crop. They have greater resilience to commodity markets, certainly, because they have many different crops.

One of the other things farmers should also be aware of in the future is there is a big trend creeping in that bio-suitability is arguably the best way to grow things. What I mean by that is, what did nature intend to grow in the area where your farm happens to be? The more you try to force something to grow where nature didn’t intend it to grow, the more chemical inputs and artificial methodologies you are going to need to make that happen. One of the things I think that farmers need to consider in the future is, what should we actually be farming here? What nature intended for us to farm here is going to minimize how many inputs we need to make it happen.

There are also going to be more exotic types of farming available to us in the near future. Solar panels are a great example. How many farmers in semi-arid regions would actually be better off having solar farms rather than crop or livestock farms? Similarly, there is a chance we are going to see algae farming developing, so you know if you have a high level of solar activity, you are going to be better off farming algae than farming crops or livestock. I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know we are going to have far more options as to what we do with our land as we move further into the future.

You mentioned alternative ways to manufacture commodities like milk.

Yeah. If you look on a long enough time horizon, we can already see emerging trends. We are starting to create agents of nutritional complexity, as opposed to biological agents of nutritional complexity. What I mean by a biological agent of nutritional complexity is, well, an example of one is a cow. You feed a cow grass, you get milk and beef from that animal when you have just fed it grass. That’s what I mean by an agent of nutritional complexity.

We are already starting to see the emergence of synthetic meat. There is synthetic milk, which is a bio-fermentation process including a type of genetically modified yeast that, when you feed it sugars, it excretes something that is molecularly identical to milk rather than excreting alcohol.

The other big one is algae. Alltech’s heterotrophic algae facility never ceases to amaze me. I just think it’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen. On the best land in the world, if you get 4.5 tons of wheat out of it a year, you are doing well. If you put a heterotrophic algae plant on the worst land in the world, you can get 60 tons of that stuff every nineteen days. The parallel I draw to this is, it’s not dissimilar to where we were in the energy market in the ‘70s. We could see that the future of energy was more than likely going to be nuclear plus solar plus batteries, but we had to make our fossil fuels system more efficient and less environmentally harmful in order to buy us time to get there. We are just about there in the energy market now. When I look at agriculture, I think there is no doubt that if we want to feed 10 billion people by 2050 without destroying our planet, we are going to need stuff like nuclear and solar that give us what we need without depleting our natural resources. I would be arguing that what we are currently trying to do is make a green revolution and agriculture more efficient and more environmentally friendly until we get to such a point that we can actually create edible, tasty and nutritious food that comes out of processes like bio-fermentation, such as synthetic milk and algae.

The other big outlier in that, as well, is insect meal. There is a big question of whether synthetic meat will ever be viable for reasons that are quite long so I’m not going to go into them here. But the other big issue with synthetic meat is, insects are able to convert base nutrients into more complex proteins at an eighty percent efficiency level. So any synthetic meat is going to have to beat how efficient insects are already. I get a little frustrated by the lack of adoption of insects in our industry, because they are such a suitable food for chickens and fish as well as humans. The thing I like to say is, when we eat insects from the sea, they command a price premium and are considered a delicacy. Insects that are found on land are considered disgusting, which I really don’t get.

That’s a really interesting point, because if you take a really good close look at a shrimp or a crayfish, they are very much like an insect or closely related. Do you eat any land-based insects?

I have. They are not that widely available in Ireland or the United States. I have no issue eating them whatsoever.

This is where stuff gets a little bit disgusting, but one of the other big things that’s important about heterotrophic algae and insect meal is, you can actually use human faeces to fuel those technologies. Scientifically speaking, there is no problem with that whatsoever, but when people think about that, even though it makes tremendous environmental and ecological sense, that really turns people’s stomachs. If we want to have 10 billion people on this planet, these are the types of solutions we need to think about. We need to make better use of our waste. If we can use our waste to make food with it, I can’t think of a better use case than that.

Maybe a starting point is to feed animals with insect protein.

I wouldn’t expect us to feed human waste to insects, then eat the insects. When I’m talking about doing that, I mean feed the insects to chickens; then we will eat the chickens. Even feed one group of insects the human waste and feed those insects to other insects, and then we can process those insects with a lot of flavorings and hopefully people will eat them then. It’s very difficult to predict the way these things will go when it’s something quite so disgusting.

One last question: How did you name your company, and what does the name mean?

We completely over-thought the name, as is our habit. I did Latin for six years, and canthus is the Latin word for the corner of your eye. In Caesar’s propaganda that he used to send back to Rome, he was always winning battles that no one else could win, because he saw things out of the corner of his eye that no one else saw. Then there is a huge artificial intelligence (AI) component to what we do as well, so Cainthus is part canthus and AI.

David Hunt spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Audio recordings of most talks, including David's, are now available on the Alltech Idea Lab. For access, click on the button below.

• Strong biosecurity protocols on-farm
• Deworm poultry litter
• Increase litter depth
• Vectors control, such as pests and beetles
• Cleaning and disinfecting equipment and facilities

• Phytogenic compounds
  • Essential oil blends and saponins
• Organic acids
• Yeast cell wall nutritional technologies
• Combinations (plant extracts, essential oils, yeast carbohydrates and organic minerals)

A successful breeding season starts with early lactation management. Getting cows off to the best possible start in early lactation is critical on every dairy farm. During spring, it is essential to ensure that the nutrient intake of the cow is adequate to meet her needs. Poor management during this important stage can lead to reduced intakes and losses in body condition score (BCS), leading to fertility issues, which can have a significant impact on a dairy farm’s bottom line.

Three ways to optimize dairy cow fertility

1. Close the energy gap

In early lactation, cows will inevitably be in a negative energy balance, meaning they are not able to take in as much energy as they require because their peak milk yield occurs before their peak in dry matter intake. Therefore, they will lose a certain amount of condition. Managing cows appropriately can minimize BCS loss during this period. One way this can be done is by feeding a diet that will encourage intake and provide adequate energy.

Often in early lactation, European cows are in a situation where they are being fed grazed grass, grass silage and concentrates. This may be cost effective, but it is not ideal for rumen conditions.

2. Maximize immunity and health

Early lactation is typically a period of stress for the cow, as there are a number of physiological and nutritional changes during this time. It is critical to ensure she has an optimal immune status during early lactation in order to maximize fertility.

Some cows will have a higher risk of uterine infections due to retained placenta and metritis after calving. Uterine infections and ovarian problems will inevitably have an effect on fertility.

Trace minerals, such as selenium, play a key role in maintaining a healthy immune system in the calving period. Other trace minerals, such as copper, and major minerals, such as phosphorus, play key roles in ovulation and cycling; if there is a deficiency in either, the possibility of anoestrus becomes more likely.

Research has proven that feeding these trace minerals in their organic form — for example, Bioplex® Copper, Bioplex® Zinc and Sel-Plex®, an organic form of selenium from Alltech — leads to these minerals being better absorbed, stored and utilized by the animal.

3. Look after the rumen

The rumen is essentially the engine that drives the cow. The key to getting more from feed is to ensure that the rumen is working as efficiently as possible.

Increased nutrient absorption allows for more milk production and also reduces the need for the cow to take these valuable nutrients from its own body reserves. This depletion of body reserves lies at the core of cow health and infertility issues.

The rumen is not designed for abrupt changes, so it is recommended that cows are gradually introduced to grass in early lactation and, if possible, are brought in at night for the first seven to 10 days after calving. If turned out abruptly, it is likely that the cow’s grass intake will not be enough to meet her energy requirements. This will have a negative impact on her BCS. The increase in starch and sugar levels in the diet during this period will cause a decrease in the pH levels in the rumen.

The use of Yea-Sacc® from Alltech has been proven to promote a higher rumen pH when fed to cows on grass in early lactation (Al Ibrahim et al., University College Dublin, 2013).

Early lactation can be a challenging time for farmers, but implementing these management tips will give your herd the best chance of getting back in calf this spring.

Watch our “Don’t compromise on cow fertility” webinar for more tips on optimizing fertility.

Adapted from a presentation by Dr. Pearse Lyons to the competitors of the 2016 Alltech Innovation Competition.

You never forget your first order

You can only start a business by going with what you know, and I knew how to improve fermentation. So, when I came across a problem related to fermentation, I took the opportunity to explain to the potential customer how I could solve the problem.

At the beginning, I was a one-man operation. When I received my first order on a Friday for Tuesday, I said “no problem,” even though it meant manufacturing 4,000 pounds ... and I didn’t have ingredients, the needed equipment or any packaging.

I recruited my next door neighbor, bought bags at the local grocery and shopped for the 16 ingredients all over the city. Then, in my home garage, we took spoonfuls of our ingredients, mixed them in a drum and then poured the mixture into 16,000 Ziploc bags we had set up all across the lawn. Fittingly, it was Labor Day weekend.

After 36 hours, Alltech was ready to be launched.

I called the customer and said the order was ready, and, much to my shock, he said, “Sorry to tell you this, Pearse, but we’re going to be closing down, so we don’t need your product any longer. I meant to call you.”

I supposed to myself that I just witnessed the rise and demise of my business in one weekend.

“Shucks, go ahead and send it to me anyway,” he said. “We’ll get back up and running in another month or so.”

Then, I decided to tell him, “Well, there’s something else. Knowing you like I know you, I knew you’d quickly want more product, so I went ahead and made two batches for you.”

To which he responded, “Oh, alright then, go ahead and ship that, too.”

As soon as I got off the phone, it was back to the neighbor’s house.

“We’re working again this weekend,” I said.

My advice to young entrepreneurs:

1. Take an order, any order. Don’t get hung up on the details, and take heart that you never get orders from the people you think you’ll get orders from.
2. Work with what you know. Identify a problem and solve it.
3. Always deliver what you say you’ll do.
4. Stay away, as long as you can, from taking partners.
5. Make a profit. Don’t sell yourself too short.
6. Appear successful.
7. Create your own culture.
8. Go with people who celebrate you, not those who tolerate you.
9. Share your success and stay curious.
10. For heaven’s sake, do something about your idea. Don’t get it right, just get it going.

The sun is shining and the skies are blue, but there is a palpable anxiety in the Florida orange groves.

A menace is lurking, evading citrus growers’ best attempts to keep it at bay and preserve their livelihood and the world’s favorite breakfast beverage.

The perpetrators are small, no bigger than an eighth of an inch, but they are mighty. The Asian citrus psyllid is responsible for transmitting a bacterial disease called Huanglongbing, better known as citrus greening.                                                                                                                   

What is citrus greening?

As the Asian citrus psyllid feeds on the phloem sap of the citrus trees, the Huanglongbing (HLB) bacteria can be injected. Phloem cells are responsible for transporting nutrients, sugars and metabolites throughout the plant, thus providing the bacteria with a carbon-rich food source.  

Typical citrus greening symptoms include blotchy mottle characterized by random patterns of asymmetrical yellowing on the leaves. In addition, the fruit are often reduced in size, fail to color properly, are misshapen, abscise from the tree prematurely and are bitter in taste. As the disease progresses, root growth is suppressed, there is twig dieback and, eventually, tree mortality occurs. 

Although some varieties of citrus show tolerance to the disease, there is no real resistance. Mature trees that become infected can take years to show symptoms, adding to the complexity of disease management. 

Citrus greening is one of the oldest and most serious citrus diseases. While the disease was first reported in China in 1919, it did not appear in Florida until 2005. 

Why should citrus greening concern you?

All commercial citrus species are susceptible to greening, and it has been reported that over 80 percent of citrus in Florida is infected.

Florida accounts for over 49 percent of citrus production in the U.S. and is one of the world’s largest contributors to the citrus juice industry. As the top agricultural sector for the state, Florida’s citrus industry provides over 76,000 full- and part-time jobs.  

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that citrus production in Florida decreased by 16 percent during the 2015–2016 season over the previous year. This is in addition to the continual decline in year-over-year production, with decreases ranging from 4–16 percent on any given year, that the state has been seeing since 2005. 

With the decrease in citrus acreage and the loss in number of production trees, Florida’s economy is being threatened. This decline could mean more sparse grocery shelves for orange juice and higher prices for consumers. 

How is the citrus industry fighting citrus greening?

In an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, the U.S. government has placed a federal order on the quarantine of citrus plants and plant parts, excluding fruit, from leaving Florida without specific approval and proof of treatment against the Asian citrus psyllid.   

The USDA is also investing millions of dollars into research against the disease. The research spans several studies, including those that look into possible bactericides and finding resistant citrus varieties.

Currently, growers are using scouting, tree removal, nutrition and pesticidal programs to manage the disease. 

Alltech Crop Science is working with growers in Florida, investigating possible ways of combating citrus greening. Research is being conducted to investigate the impact of nutritional inputs as well as to identify how this disease impacts defense genes within infected trees.     

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Water is the most precious element on Earth. Access to clean water is fundamental for all living creatures, and for farm animals, the quality of the water they drink can have a direct impact on performance and productivity.

Like humans, most of the pig’s body is water, making up 82 percent of a young pig’s bodyweight and 55 percent of grown pig’s bodyweight (Kober, 1993).

In general, pigs tend to drink about 10 percent of their bodyweight per day or roughly two times the amount of feed they eat. Mortality, feed intake, growth rates and feed efficiency rates are known to be affected by the quality of the water provided (Stull et al., 1999).

Five points of water quality in pig production

In general, the quality of the pig’s water can be determined by measuring the presence of the following organic and inorganic elements:

1.Total bacterial count

Water contamination by bacteria is estimated by measuring the level of coliforms per milliliter of water. A total bacterial count of 50 colony forming units (cfu)/ml is considered good. If coliform levels are higher than 100 cfu/ml, then it is recommended to use a chlorine treatment.

When dealing with bacteria in the drinking water, it is important to consider the cleanliness of the water lines. Biofilm in pipes can be a considerable source of microorganisms in the water, but chlorine-based disinfectants have little to no effect on biofilms.  It’s important to flush out all buildup regularly.

2. pH

Water pH ranging from 5.5 to 8.5 is considered acceptable. If water is too acidic (lower than 5), it can create corrosion and damage pipes and waterlines; on the other hand, a basic pH (higher than 8.5) can leave scaly deposits.

3. Hardness

Calcium and magnesium are the two predominant minerals that make water “hard.” In pig production, hard water can contribute to the formation of scale deposits. The optimum water hardness in pig production is below 60 parts per million (ppm) of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).

4. Total dissolved solids

Total dissolved solids (TDS), also known as water salinity, is the amount of soluble salts and minerals dissolved in the water. Contaminants are usually measured in parts per million (ppm). The majority of the time, the amount of minerals or salts dissolved is well within the acceptable ranges, but sometimes very high levels can damage performance or equipment.

5. Nitrates and nitrites

Nitrates and nitrites are usually present in the water because the water supply is exposed to material with high nitrogen levels, such as animal waste, nitrogen fertilizers or decomposing organic material. Especially in monogastric animals, nitrites are 10 times more toxic than nitrates (Emerick, 1974). Levels as low as 0.10 mg/l of nitrite can impact performance in pigs.

There are various methods for treating water based on the type of issue as well as its severity:

Good water quality starts by implementing a program for testing as well as training farm personnel on spotting issues. It is recommended to test water quality in the pig barn at least twice a year and to test both at the beginning and at the end of the water lines. Over time, a biofilm will form inside pipes; it is important to treat waterlines with hydrogen peroxide and organic acids to flush out any buildup.

Water is the single most important nutrient, yet sometimes it can be taken for granted. By implementing a program that monitors and maintains proper levels of the five water quality indicators and by carrying out proper equipment maintenance, pig producers will be able to avoid costly problems that can negatively affect the performance of their herd.

Quality norms for water

I want to learn more about nutrition for my pig herd.