The livestock and animal industries are important parts of a country’s economy.

A number of industries ranging in size are based on animals and animal products. Development of these industries is directly dependent on the animals’ diets.

The ingredients in the form of food consumed by animals on daily basis, are

termed as an animal ration or animal feed. Formulation of animal ration is a process that involves combining different nutrient ingredients in such an efficient manner to provide sufficient

amounts of energy and nutrition to animals at different stages of metabolism and production.

This article presents a summary of feed formulation software. Content is divided into three categories: for aquatic animals, for poultry and for ruminants. A description and comparison of various software is provided, explaining the features and uses of each software. Feed formulation

Animal ration should be formulated in such a way to fulfill the energy requirements of animals. This is one of the basic needs of livestock management and for industries based on animal yields. Different kinds of animals have various energy requirements

Feed formulation software A review for ruminant, aquatic and poultry by Dr Pratiksha Saxena Department of Applied Mathematics and Dr Rajkumar, Gautam Buddha University, India

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according to their age, reproduction and metabolism. It is a very important to formulate the animal feed efficiently

to meet the animal’s specific requirements at a particular age and stage of life. Feed formulation encompasses selecting a combination of feed ingredients that adequately meet the required nutrition and other requirements of animals at different stages of life.

In addition to this, cost is also an important factor for any industry. The main objective of ration formulation is to provide a satisfactory nutrient level for a specific animal species whilst minimising cost.

In order to achieve this, mathematical techniques and

optimisation models had been used over 100 years ago. These optimisation models are used in such a way to provide information on energy requirements at different stages for growth, reproduction, metabolism and lactation at optimum cost.

To formulate an animal feed, knowledge of basic animal nutrition, the nutrition levels of feed ingredients, feed composition, as well as mathematical programming techniques are important.

Feed analysisAnalysing feeds is an important part of diet formulation as

different kinds of available feedstuffs vary in composition. A ‘balanced diet’ is the term given to a feed which provides all necessary nutrition to an animal and should simulate feeding behaviours.

Animal feed should be formulated in such a way that it is highly digestible whilst causing the least amount of environmental damage.

Initially, a variety of methods were used for feed analysis, such as the trial and error method, linear programming methods and other conventional methods. As time passed different forms of mathematical programming were used for better results, methods such as stochastic programming, goal programming and other non-linear programming techniques.

Manual calculations and applications are time consuming, tedious and prone to errors. As the number of feed ingredients increase, the complexity of feed formulation models also increase. In this era of technology, specifically designed software and computers are used for this purpose, providing more accurate results for a larger number of variables in less time.

These days it is common to formulate feed for commercial purposes using software. This software is well programmed to compute the nutrient profile of a feed, to access a feed library and to apply this to a feed formulation.

Software for aquatic feeds‘Diet Formulator Program’ has been developed to formulate the

feed for freshwater and marine finfish and shrimp. It is not based on least-cost diet formulation program, but rather a simple excel-based diet calculation program.

The user selects ingredients and the program calculates the nutritional information of the formulated diet. The program also allows the user to insert other ingredients for a chemical analysis. Ingredient costs can be entered in the database and the program will calculate the ingredient cost of the diet formulation.

‘Fishfarm Solutions’ is a program designed for simple rations on the basis of Pearson square ration formulation. Nutrient contents of ingredients and nutrient requirements are expressed on the same basis.

This excel sheet formulator needs a comprehensive list of all the feed ingredients with their protein levels as inputs. Then according to the required quantity of feed, it combines different kinds of ingredients from the list.

‘Winfeed’ formulates diet for ruminants, non-ruminants, poultry, pets and fish. It is based on linear and stochastic programming. It can work with an unlimited number of ingredients and nutrients.

It is user friendly software which also calculates marginal price, shadow price and assists with cost analysis. It is compatible with excel and can import or export data for feed formulation. It also provides graphical reports in the form of pie charts and bar graphs.

Software for poultry‘Poultry Feed Formulation’ is freely available software and

from the year 2014 it is also available as an android application.

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Features include broiler feed and layer feed formulation information. Ration is divided for four broiler stages: starter, grower, finisher one and finisher two.

Layer feed formulation is divided into seven stages: starter, grower, developer, prelay, peak, layer one and layer two. This is user-friendly software that allows the user to edit, save, email as well has having the ability to print the output formulations. Any user input errors are highlighted if variables are not in the range of a breed’s requirement.

‘Kasturi’ is poultry management software that manages feed formulation for layers, hatchery, and broilers. Covering all aspects of the hatchery, from housing of newly born chicks to egg laying birds, setting of eggs, to hatching of chicks. Kasturi keeps a record of daily events such as mortalities, culls, feed consumption rates and type of feeds being used.

It can formulate the feed, analyse nutrients, temperature, humidity, light, body weight, uniformity and vaccination schedule. It can generate several types of reports on medication, vaccinations, sales, purchases, stocks and monthly performance among other options.

‘Ration Formula Express’ (RFE) for poultry produced by VETSOFT Software Corporation is a program based on least cost feed formulation. This poultry management program uses operation research techniques to formulate the least cost ration depending on the requirements of breed and prices of ingredients. RFE has bilingual language capabilities for English and Arabic. It is based on feed composition according to NRC 1994.

It also takes care of shadow price and provides results in the form of comparable decision sheets and graphs. These display the ration formula ingredient quantities, a nutrients analysis, as well as nutrients constraints and requirements.

Software for ruminants‘Feedlive’ is used to formulate diet for swine, sheep, poultry

and other animals. It is based on least cost formulation and linear programming. A special feature of this software is that it accumulates data on mono and polygastic animal feeds all into one place. It is a MS windows application that can formulate feed for any batch size. Feedlive has the ability to analyse an existing formula, functioning in a backward operation.

- ‘Feedsoft’ Feedsoft® cloud formulation is a platform, which provides live statistics to individuals or small size companies with general formulation needs. It can also modify all nutrient data easily via its ‘nutrient editor screen’. Feedsoft® is a user-friendly interface that is assessable via mobile phone.

- ‘Spesfeed’ software is for poultry and other animals. It supplies and supports two different feed formulation systems ‘Spesfeed Express’ and ‘Format International’, each offer their own advantages. Spesfeed Express is a small user friendly system, limited to a single user, it has a restricted amount of nutrient data that can be considered. Format International has a wide range of software. It caters for large and sophisticated users. Features include a multi-user system which allows the manipulation of large data bases, multi-mix and global-mix formulation.

‘FeedMU’ is a simple feed formulation program, which uses the trial and error method, and linear programming to produce a least cost feed formula. It can be used for simple feed in animal farms and complex feeds in feed mill.

It is a MS Windows based application developed using Visual Basic and .NET application for feed formulation. FeedMU uses information on animals’ requirements, ingredient details and feed composition to formulate a well balanced diet. It has a function to transfer requirements and ingredients data to others and it can export formula reports in PDF format.

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