By Dr Jolly Kabirizi and Joshua Kato
Livestock (cattle, sheep, rabbits, goats and pigs) provide: food, cash income, insurance and savings, draft power, energy and social capital, among other things.
Households that include livestock in their enterprise mix tend to perform better socially and economically.
Improved livestock production is a function of genetic and several management factors but poor nutritional status is considered the most challenging constraint.
This is due to inadequate (quality and quantity) feed availability and unimproved practices used by farmers in the utilization of available local feed resources.
The major part of the feed supplied thus goes just to satisfy maintenance requirements. Poor animal nutrition leads to high susceptibility to diseases and parasites.
These cause exceedingly high losses in animal productivity. New feeds and feed management technologies offer many opportunities for innovations in animal feed and nutrition.
Agro-Industrial By-Products
Agro-industrial by-products are mostly derived from agricultural processing industries such as cereal grain milling, oilseed extraction, brewery, malt production, fruit and vegetable processing. These represent a vast potential source of animal feed, which are currently not fully exploited. Although the nutritional value of most agro-industrial by-products is widely known, their utilisation is hindered by several factors such as poor control of processing techniques, fluctuating supply, limited access to available suppliers, poor marketing channels, difficulty in transferring existing technologies and lack of legislation on their trade and use.
Agro-industrial by- products have several advantages, such as: (a) relatively cheap or no cost, (b) feed shortage during periods of scarcity and uneven distribution, (c) they do not compete for human food resources, (d) they have comparable values to the crop they are derived.
Sustainability: Recovery and Reuse of Brewing-Derived By-Products
Among all industrial processes, the brewing process has one of the greatest impacts on the environment due to the huge amount of waste such as: brewer’s spent grain and brewery spent yeast solution, also known as residual yeast. Landfill for solid wastes and disposal via sewage for liquid wastes are unsustainable and expensive options. For this reason, most brewing industries have adopted disposal options for their waste streams that are within their financial and geographical reach, often favouring their use as animal feed. Industries are interested in new solutions, and they are been adopting technological advances to reduce the amount of waste produced and to generate useful materials from brewing-derived by-products.
