What You Need to Know About Animal Feed Micronutrient and Causes of its Deficiency?

The increasing globalization and urbanization are changing the lifestyle of consumers. The consumers are now significantly increasing the consumption of nutrients to meet the everyday need of nutrition for sustaining their stressed lifestyle. This has created a massive demand for dairy and meat products across the globe, which is resulting in growing demand for animal feed micronutrient.

What is Animal Feed Micronutrient?

The nutrients needed in trace amounts by an organism are called as micronutrients. Micronutrient is also important in animal feed. They are commonly used to increase feed consistency and to boost overall animal health. Foods that are characterized by biologically active ingredients of high content and favorable fatty acid profiles, such as minerals or vitamins, are therefore sought. Micronutrients can play a key role in the body for metabolic activities and enhancing immunity power of the body. As per the Research Dive analyst review, se micronutrients are vital animal food substances for improving the growth, health and milk yield of the animal, which are unable to gain from traditional foods.

The Need for Micronutrient

Each elements of micronutrient plays a major role in physiological functioning of animal. Usually, this is also the primary cause for the apparent symptoms of clinical deficiency. Many of the functions are biochemically delivered through the actions of co-enzymes and enzymes, which are dependent on micronutrients. Enzymes that are dependent and associated with micronutrients are often termed as ‘metallo-enzymes.’ These enzymes are critical in all areas of physiology and assist largely in the chemical transformations that enable the occurrence of biochemical reactions.

Importance of Nutrition and Digestion

There are a variety of reasons why nutrition is important. Animals need proper nutrition for maintenance and growth, and to provide energy for work and vital functions. The maintenance nutrition helps animals to maintain its current weight, whereas, energy nutrition helps in performing vital body functions. Proper nutrition is also needed to reproduce, maintain body temperature, develop proper bone structures, and produce milk.

Animals can develop health problems without proper nutrition, which may result fatality or treatment costs. Thus, a good nutrition is important for all of the systems of an animal to properly work and function together.

Benefits of Dietary Supplements

Dietary supplementation with nutrients such as zinc, glutamine, arginine can regulate key metabolic pathways and gene expression to improve immune function, fertility, neonatal survival & growth, pregnancy outcome, meat quality, and feed efficiency. Overall, a good balance of vitamins, energy, protein, and all other important nutritional minerals in diets is required to make an effective nutrition program that is both economical and productive. Both applied and fundamental research is needed to meet this goal.

Getting Adequate Water Intake

Water is a crucial element of the nutrition program for animals. The substandard quality of water can result in several problems for livestock. A top livestock enterprise needs a good water supply, in terms of both quality and quantity, as consuming water is most important. For livestock, safe supplies of water are undeniably essential. If livestock do not intake a good quantity of safe water every day, production will fall, intake of feed will drop, and the producer of livestock will lose money.

Approaches to Correct Animal Feed Micronutrient Deficiency

There are several ways of correcting an imbalance or low supply of minerals to livestock and other animals. If carried out carefully, most of these can be effective. They are listed as follows:

• Treat the soil

• Sprays and fertilizers

• Treat the herbage

• Herbage sprays

• Treat the animal

• Feeding licks and blocks

• Metered water

The animal feed micronutrient deficiencies, especially in the sub-clinical form, can distinctly reduce the profitability and performance of a livestock agricultural system. Thus, farmers need to be more focused on the approaches to balance the decision on animal feed supplementation.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.