Feed costs account for a large proportion of the costs of pig production representing usually around 50% of the total costs (Aranda and Cleary, 2001). in the Australian pig industry this proportion has been much higher recently due to the shortage of feed resulting from the extensive drought. Selection for feed efficiency is always an important topic, independent of the current drought situatio...

Compound feed is a mixture of feed ingredients obtained from various sources. A feed ingredient is only a constituent of a compound feed and if used as the sole ration fed, has to be enriched further. The composition of a compound feed is determined by three main criteria, i.e. price, nutritional composition and the animal characteristics. The nutritional composition of a compound feed varies d...

Since synchrotron radiation was discovered, advanced synchrotron radiation based bioanalytical techniques have been rapidly developed such as synchrotron radiation based soft x-ray (SR-XMS) and synchrotron-based Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (SR-IMS). In this article, recently obtained information on potential applications of these bioanalytical techniques (SR-XMS & SR-IMS) was r...

Sustainable feed formulation (defined here as nutritional and economic feed optimization) is substantial in feed chain production from crop farmers to livestock producers. Diet formulation employing a static linear programming (LP) approach, which is widely used in trading firms and feed production facilities, does not allow for intertemporal flexibility. Our approach allows the interaction bet...

In order to evaluate the influence of masticatory movement on cranial bone mineral density (BMD) and osteocyte and osteoblast micromorphology, we conducted a study in rats fed with solid feed (n=10) and powdered feed (n=10). Cranial BMD was measured by dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Osteocyte morphology was evaluated by light microscopy. In addition, some of the tissue was treated with EDTA-K...