engleski

MICROBILOGICAL QUALITY OF FEED

In most countries, microbiological quality of feeds is sadly a much-underrated aspect of official feed control. Indeed, monitoring the microbiological quality of feeds (i) downgrades the poor quality feeds, (ii) stimulates mills to produce better quality feeds and (iii) enforces the prominence of high quality feeds on the market. Those high quality feeds, when vastly available on the markets, will then fuel better performances of farm animals and thus sustain more successful farmers. Moreover, monitoring microbial feed quality also allows shedding the light on mills with systemic bad hygiene, unsatisfactory storing environment or working with low-grade raw materials. On the latter, the microbiological feed quality analysis enables to pinpoint dangerous species of moulds (mycotoxins producers), that are often not covered by the traditional feed safety spectrum. Those moulds could originate either from disease-stricken plant material (e.g. Fusarium spp) or from inadequate storing conditions (e.g. Aspergillus spp and Penicillium spp). The same is true for the aerobic mesophilic bacterial flora of those feeds, which can be either associated with epiphytic bacteria “from the field” or from the flora that develops during storage. Total yeasts counts are also analyzed. Feed quality is assessed through a single VDLUFA method used for decades by the laboratory members of the European Feed Microbiology Organization (EFMO). This involves (i) counting the bacteria, moulds and yeasts present in the samples, (ii) classifying them into 7 functional categories and (iii) comparing the obtained concentrations of categories to elaborate „normal“ values for each type of matrices and taking into account the types of feeding animals. The aim was to gather the results of microbiological feed quality of three countries and to make a survey of the monitoring over a year. 125 samples form Croatia, 46 from Slovenia and 130 from Switzerland are used in this study. The results give an overview of the advantages of monitoring the microbiological quality of feeds for both governmental authorities, producers and consumers alike and potentially enlighten new aspects of the risk assessment of certain types of feeds or their raw materials

feed quality, control, saprophytes microorganisms, perspectives

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