AFIA Nutrition Program Review: An Update on Known Nutrition Components

At the American Feed Industry Association’s “New Understanding of ‘Old’ Ingredients” session held at IPPE, one theme kept coming forward: Precision is more important than ever and the details we once highlighted are now driving performance.

The calcium conversation is no longer so simple

Calcium is hardly a new topic—it’s nutrition 101.

But Su A. Lee, Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, made it clear that is not the question of the day. whether Calcium is important – how much, how variable and how accurate we measure it.

Excess and inconsistent levels of calcium can interfere with nutrient utilization and ultimately affect animal performance. This is a big deal when the margins are tight and every decimal point counts in the composition. What may once be considered a “common” mineral can quietly affect digestion, efficiency, and benefits.

Protein is not just protein

Caitlin Gaffield, PhD, Kansas State University, encouraged attendees to rethink how the animal feed industry approaches commercial protein formulation. Key learning? It’s no longer just about hitting raw protein numbers. It is about understanding the standardized ileal digestible lysine to crude protein ratio and how this balance affects performance.

As the production system evolves, the tolerance for inefficiency decreases. Targets with more or less amino acids than protein show up in real-world performance metrics. Although protein has always been an important ingredient for broiler chickens, modern knowledge of protein helps to increase efficiency and reduce wastage.

Modern aviation, modern mathematics

Jared Oxford, Ph.D., Cargill of North America, continued on the topic of how energy and amino acid optimization should be tailored to the needs of today’s broilers—not the broilers of 10 or 20 years ago. Genetics have changed. The grow lights have changed. Nutrient responses are altered. Yet, at times, the building strategies have not kept pace.

This is what precision nutrition looks like

What connected the entire conference was the broader movement toward precision nutrition.

As Yuan Tai Hong, Ph.D., Senior Research Manager at IFEEDER and editor of the event, put it:

“The presentations at the AFIA Nutrition Symposium take us one step further on precision nutrition by emphasizing that we need a deeper understanding of the nutrition we provide. Nutritionists are encouraged to consider the level of dissolved calcium in feed and ingredients, the amount of acids in the ratio of lysine to crude proteins and dietary acids. Responses in modern poultry because research findings show that these factors now affect animal performance and production.

This is change.

We are no longer prepared for book values ​​alone. We use formulas to analyze values. We reconsider relationships that once seemed static. We review nutrient-to-energy relationships based on modern genetics and recent research.

In other words: the components may be the same, but the playbook is evolving.

Small adjustments, big impact

One of the biggest takeaways for me? Innovation doesn’t always mean finding new ingredients, sometimes it means asking better questions about what we’ve used for decades.

• Are we accounting for change?
• Are we optimizing ratios instead of chasing sums?
• Are we adjusting formulas to today’s animals – not yesterday’s data?

Meetings like this are a reminder that our industry is not standing still. At a time when manufacturers are closely monitoring costs while performance expectations remain high, incremental improvements in structure can translate into measurable gains. And maybe that’s the real headline: “Old” ingredients still have a lot to teach us.