Alltech's vice president Aidan Connolly addressed more than 1,200 Chinese feed companies, academic and political leaders at the Ninth China Animal Husbandry and Feed Technology Economic Forum, held in Beijing.

During his presentation, Connolly summarised Alltech's vision of the future of the Chinese feed industry in four points namely consolidation, automation, consumer demands and precise nutrition.

Between 1990 and 2012 the number of feed mills in both Europe and the US dropped by a third, while their production capacity increased over 80%. A similar trend is forecast to take place in China in the next 5-10 years, Connolly said. He also said that feed mills of the future will be fully automated systems. Automation can not only reduce cost, but also increase manufacturing accuracy and play a part in biosecurity. Connolly also mentioned that safe feed is essential to produce safe food, thus feed producers must use safe and natural technologies in their production to ensure full traceability, consistent quality and biosecurity. At the same time, feed producers will need to significantly increase their feed efficiency.

With regards to precise nutrition he said that in the future, feed producers will be able to access information from technologies such as nutrigenomics, NIR, temperature probes and automatic weighing scales.  These and other real time information systems will identify, on a minute-by-minute basis, the effect that nutrition is having at a genetic level, in relation to animal growth, diseases, food safety and food quality. This will lead to 'precision nutrition' or the development of systems that deliver precise nutrients when animals require them.