Feed Industry Regulations & Additives

Question 1

Turkey producer supplies feed formulation to mill and takes delivery of pelleted feed. Turkeys suffer bone deformities due to insufficient Calcium in diet. Who’s at fault?

Answer 1

• Depends – more information needed.
• Need to examine the nutritional adequacy of the formulation provided to the feed mill. If the formulation was inadequate for calcium or had other problems e.g. low vitamin D or excess phosphate, then the fault lies with the producer who formulated the diet.
• You also need to send the diet that was produced for detailed nutritional analysis to see if it matched the formulation that it was given. If the diets produced were found to have insufficient calcium, or insufficient vitamin D or excess phosphate, despite a nutritionally adequate formulation given to them, then the fault is with the feed mill. In this case, the feed mill likely made an error in weighing out the ingredients, forgot an ingredient or insufficiently mixed them so that some of the diet (the portions you tested) had inadequate calcium.
• There are other possibilities. For instance, the producers of the feed ingredient(s) used by the feed mill could have produced a bad ingredient, but this would be harder to prove unless the feed mill still had some of the unused ingredient left on hand to be analyzed.

Question 2

Feed mill delivers swine feed containing a guaranteed minimum of 20% crude protein. The producer has the feed independently tested and it contains 19.5% crude protein. Is there a problem?

Answer 2

• No. The allowable variance below the minimum crude protein for diets containing 24% crude protein or less is 1%.
• The variance observed here is only 0.5%, which is less variance than the allowable amount, so no problem.

Question 3

A veterinarian produces broiler feed for clients at a licensed commercial feed mill. It contains a feed ingredient not listed in Schedule 4 and an antibiotic at levels 10% higher than specified in the CMIB. Is there a problem?

Answer 3

• We did not cover this in class, but the tolerance for variances in antibiotic concentrations from the labelled amount in a medicated feed is surprisingly much wider than for nutrients – it’s +/- 25% of the labelled amount. See Feeds Regulations Schedule 2, column 2 of the Government of Canada website for the guidelines. Feeds Regulations, 2024.
• In other words, there is no problem with the medicated feed in this case.