Aidan Connolly, President, AgriTech Capital, is a food/feed/farm futurologist and author of the book The Future of Agriculture.
Ask a livestock nutritionist what’s in a diet and they can tell you to the gram. Ask them how much of it the animal absorbs, and the answer gets a lot less precise. That’s not a knock on nutritionists. It’s a gap in what the industry has historically measured.
The amount included in a ration is not necessarily the amount the animal can use. If a meaningful share of a vitamin, mineral or other active compound is lost before it’s absorbed, cost per kilogram included isn’t the whole story. Alternatively, cost per unit available to the animal may matter more. That distinction matters well beyond nutrition, as the industry faces the challenge of feeding a growing population with constrained land and resources under a changing climate.
A Ration Is Not A Guarantee
For decades, feed formulation has largely revolved around two questions: What combination of ingredients will meet the animal’s nutritional requirements, and at what cost? Modern formulation software can balance dozens of nutrient specifications against ingredient prices and constraints to identify a least-cost ration.
What a formulation sheet may not fully capture is what happens after the feed leaves the mill. Pelleting exposes sensitive vitamins to heat, moisture, pressure and abrasion, while storage can further compromise vitamin stability. Once inside the animal, unprotected trace minerals can interact with compounds such as phytate, reducing the amount available for absorption. Unused nutrients will become available to pathogens, creating collateral health challenges. None of that shows up on a formulation sheet, but it can show up in performance and animal health.
A common industry response is to build in safety margins, including vitamins and minerals above estimated requirements to account for expected losses. It’s workable, but it adds cost and treats a timing and delivery problem as if it were simply a quantity problem.
Timing Is Becoming A Design Variable
Advances in feed technology are making when and where a nutrient becomes available something that can be engineered, rather than simply compensated for by adding more. That differs from precision nutrition, which focuses on matching nutrient supply to an animal’s requirements. Here, the focus is on controlling how a nutrient is protected and where and when it is released along the digestive tract.
The shift toward improving nutrient protection, delivery and bioavailability is already taking several forms across the industry. Adisseo’s Smartamine M uses a pH-sensitive coating designed to protect methionine in the rumen and release it after rumen passage. Kemin uses encapsulation technologies including spray freezing to provide targeted release along the gastrointestinal tract, while Balchem’s ReaShure and CapShure are rumen-protected choline products designed to protect choline from rumen degradation. Alltech’s Optigen is a slow-release source of nonprotein nitrogen urea designed to feed the rumen microbes over time, while Novus’s Zn is a zinc chelate more available than conventional inorganic sources. The technologies differ, but they reflect the same shift toward designing around what the animal can actually use.
Jefo’s Matrix Technology is the fourth generation of precision nutrients, bringing together protection and controlled release at intestinal level. North Carolina State University researchers describe the technology as microencapsulating active nutrients within a hydrogenated vegetable-oil matrix. In a recent broiler trial, birds receiving the microencapsulated premix at as little as 25% of the conventional inclusion rate maintained performance while showing greater jejunal villus height. A separate peer-reviewed study also reported higher egg production and better feed conversion, although chicks were slightly lighter at hatch: right nutrient, in the right place, at the right time and in the right form.
Together, the findings raise a broader question about how much of what is formulated into rations is ultimately utilized.
The Economics Of Bioavailability
If bioavailability can be measured, it changes how feed ingredients should be valued. A nutrient source that costs more per kilogram or per pound can offer better value when evaluated on the amount actually available to the animal, particularly when procurement decisions are based primarily on purchase price.
There’s also a sustainability dimension. Nutrients that aren’t absorbed are largely excreted, contributing to the mineral load in manure. Technology that lets producers reduce inclusion levels without sacrificing performance or animal health is, in practical terms, both a nutrition improvement and an environmental one.
The implications also extend beyond the farm. Global food demand is expected to continue rising toward mid-century while agricultural land and water remain constrained. Getting more usable nutrition from feed is therefore not simply about producing meat, milk or eggs more cheaply, but about using resources more efficiently, reducing environmental impacts and strengthening the food system that supplies a growing population.
For feed and animal health companies, the strategic implication is that protected or encapsulated nutrients may need to be evaluated differently from their free-form equivalents. A straight cost-per-kilogram comparison can miss differences in nutrient availability and biological response, pointing to the need for a different economic yardstick.
Production technology is getting better at measuring what’s actually happening inside an animal in real time. Nutrient delivery technology sits on the other side of that same shift: not measuring outcomes after the fact, but controlling what reaches the animal in the first place.
Formulation answers what goes into the ration. The next round of efficiency gains in animal nutrition will come from a different question entirely: not what’s in the feed, but how much of it the animal can actually use. The farmer, the animal and the planet need that innovation.
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