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Towards sustainable animal diets






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    Book (stand-alone)
    Towards a concept of Sustainable Animal Diets
    Report based on the collated results of a survey of stakeholder views
    2014
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    Animal feed and feeding is pivotal to livestock production. Feed forms up to 70% of the cost of animal production and hence is financially the single most important element in animal husbandry. Animal productivity, health and welfare, product quality and safety, producers’ income, household security, but also land use and land use change, water pollution and greenhouse gas emission, are affected to a great extent by diet selection and how a diet is fed to livestock. Furthermore, animal feed and feeding directly or indirectly affects the entire livestock sector and associated services.
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    Article
    Towards sustainable animal diets: a survey based study 2014
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    A 60-70% increase in consumption of animal products is expected by 2050. This increase in the consumption will demand enormous resources, the feed being the most challenging because of the limited availability of natural resources, ongoing climatic changes and food-feed-fuel competition. The costs of conventional feed resources such as soymeal and fishmeal are very high and moreover their availability in the future will be limited. Insect rearing could be a part of the solutions. Although some s tudies have been conducted on evaluation of insects, insect larvae or insect meals as an ingredient in the diets of some animal species, this field is in infancy. Here we collate, synthesize and discuss the available information on five major insect species studied with respect to evaluation of their products as animal feed. The nutritional quality of black soldier fly larvae, the house fly maggots, mealworm, locusts-grasshoppers-crickets, and silkworm meal and their use as a replacement of soym eal and fishmeal in the diets of poultry, pigs, fish species and ruminants are discussed. The crude protein contents of these alternate resources are high: 42 to 63% and so are the lipid contents (up to 36% oil), which could possibly be extracted and used for various applications including biodiesel production. Unsaturated fatty acid concentrations are high in housefly maggot meal, mealworm and house cricket (60-70%), while their concentrations in black soldier fly larvae are lowest (19-37%). Th e studies have confirmed that palatability of these alternate feeds to animals is good and they can replace 25 to 100% of soymeal or fishmeal depending on the animal species. Except silkworm meal other insect meals are deficient in methionine and lysine and their supplementation in the diet can enhance both the performance of the animals and the soymeal and fishmeal replacement rates. Most insect meals are deficient in Ca and its supplementation in the diet is also required, especially for growi ng animals and laying hens. The levels of Ca and fatty acids in insect meals can be enhanced by manipulation of the substrate on which insects are reared. The paper also presents future areas of research. The information synthesized is expected to open new avenues for a large scale use of insect products as animal feed.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Towards the Development of Guidelines for Improving the Sustainability of Diets and Food Consumption Patterns in the Mediterranean Area
    The Sustainability of Food Systems in the Mediterranean Area. Session 1, Food Systems and Sustainable Diets: The Mediterranean Diet as a Pilot Study
    2012
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    The challenge of feeding the growing world population, which is expected to reach 9 billion people in 2050, requires new strategies to ensure food security, in which dietary patterns are important drivers for building sustainable agricultural and food systems. ? Today, the main challenge for the food and agricultural sector is to simultaneously provide enough food, in quantity and quality, to meet nutritional needs and to conserve the natural resources for present and future generations. ? F AO estimates that in 2050 to satisfy the demand of a growing and richer population, with an increased meat demand, food production will have to increase by at least 60 percent in the next decades.

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