8th October 2022
AB Neo’s New Centre of Excellence to Generate ‘Near-Market’ Data on Piglet Nutrition Solutions
18 October 2022 – It is immensely frustrating to have a solution which works in a research setting, but not in the practical conditions of the real world.
To help bridge the gap between the two, AB Neo (a business within AB Agri focusing on neonatal and maternal stages in animals) is bringing online a new Centre of Excellence. This facility, which the company describes as “near-market”, is intended to ensure its solutions are fully tested and bring value to customers before they launch commercially.
In the words of AB Neo’s Technical Director Simon Tibble, “Evidence is a critical parameter for producers to make the right decision for their own circumstances.” Today, he describes how the evidence generated by the new Centre of Excellence will help progress the industry’s understanding of the most critical points in a piglet’s life.
[Feedinfo] AB Neo will soon be officially inaugurating its new Centre of Excellence to study and refine the application of its swine products. What can you tell me about the size and capabilities of the new centre?
[Simon Tibble] Our new Centre of Excellence is the largest “near-market” application centre in Europe dedicated specifically to piglet nutrition. It is a brand-new commercial trial unit that has been designed and developed to enable us to confirm research concepts in a large-scale, near-market environment.
It is based in Aragon, in the heart of pig production in Spain, and has facilities to take 1,300 piglets per week into 7 rooms. There are 52 pens per room, where piglets will stay for 6 weeks so that we can concentrate on developments, assessment and innovative nutritional solutions in the post-weaning period.
The CoE is equipped with all the latest technology including cloud-based environmental and feeding systems. It has an automatic feed mixing/delivery system accessing from 28 silos, enabling us to deliver individual feeds into individual pens. One room is equipped with 4 smart feeders; piglets will be electronically chipped to record piglet weight, feed intake and water consumption daily. The data logger will also record internal and external temperatures, humidity, CO2 and ammonia levels.
Finally, the unit will maintain links with the maternity farm for full pre-weaning history, as well as to the grower/finisher farm to determine how our post-weaning developments impact lifetime performance.
[Feedinfo] Let’s talk a bit about the journey to this point. Why did AB Neo decide such a facility was necessary? How does it represent a departure from, or an improvement to, the company’s previous system for application testing, and R&D more generally?
[Simon Tibble] AB Neo has been focused on R&D and product development at its four individual sites for decades and has unlocked new nutrition solutions to both enhance pig production as well as, in some cases, to help solve global challenges. One example is the development of AlphaSoy, an alternative protein source carefully engineered to unlock the natural functional properties of soya and give more nutrition value from a single ingredient.
However, we have always faced 2 challenges: we know the importance of this initial 6-week period in both the physical and psychological development of the piglet and its impact on efficient lifetime performance but there are no facilities that are specifically set up that can meet our precise research requirements. In addition, the timescales for innovation and proof of concepts in near-market conditions have been lengthy and inefficient, which is a significant challenge in a rapidly changing global arena. So, these two factors drove the decision to make this investment, and it will enable us to fulfil AB Neo’s mission to deliver measurable value to our customers through world-leading research.
We have now centralised an amazingly talented team of nutritionists and vets to combine knowledge, expertise, and ideas rather than having them working individually. With such a wealth of experience, this new structure can inspire ‘blue-sky thinking’ whilst keeping our customer at the heart of our ideation, which is so important to our success.
In terms of improvements, I have already outlined many – greater innovation and product development and shorter and more efficient timeframes amongst them – but additionally, a deeper understanding of the physiological development of pigs and the impact of various stimuli will help global advances in pig production.
[Feedinfo] How long has it been under construction? How much did you invest in it?
[Simon Tibble] We acquired the site late 2020. We have invested €2.3 million in the construction.
[Feedinfo] What questions will the Centre of Excellence be focusing on in the immediate future? What trials are lined up for the facility?
[Simon Tibble] From an EU perspective, the industry is still learning to live without the use of pharmacological doses of zinc oxide, so a key focus will continue to be understanding the impact of early nutrition of the piglet, accelerating gut maturation and creating a balanced and diverse microbiota that allows us to rear our piglets in a more sustainable, healthy manner with reduced dependency on the use of antibiotics.
[Feedinfo] How does the new facility affect your relationships with universities and other institutes doing animal nutrition research? Should the industry expect to see peer-reviewed research coming out of this facility?
[Simon Tibble] Absolutely. We see our CoE completing our research triangle and therefore our relationships with universities and institutes around the globe will only continue to grow. In fact, over the last 18 months, AB Neo has been working hard to establish links with the leading research universities across the globe. These establishments allow us to test innovation at a level where we can understand and anticipate how concepts could benefit commercial pig production and bring value to our customers.
We are then able to take this preparatory work and look more specifically, and in more detail, at the results in a controlled commercial environment, with the ability to test and control variables at the CoE. Our final step in bringing innovative nutritional solutions to the market is testing our solutions on our network of local application farms in Denmark, Poland, UK and Spain, measuring results in local conditions.
In line with our goal of being leaders in “first class research”, our research must be robust. Therefore, peer reviewed research, along with external auditing of our research, allows us to benchmark our progress and to ensure we continue to bring near-market solutions.
[Feedinfo] What can you tell us of AB Neo’s future plans when it comes to “near-market” research in swine nutrition and health?
[Simon Tibble] The CoE here in Europe is only the first step, we envisage similar centres in Asia and LATAM as we reach the key global swine producing centres to offer our innovative solutions. We also recognise that post-weaning performance is significantly influenced by pre-weaning nutrition of the sow and her litter, so it would be no surprise if, in the future, we decide to establish similar facilities focused on the maternity period.
Published in association with AB Neo