Animal feed provide necessary nutrients and energy for the livestock, but sometimes its not enough, in animal farming business, people also use feed additives for many productive purposes, such as improving feed quality, digestibility, animal performance and overall health. This table compares  some of the most popular feed additives, we can clearly see that all of them are targeting the gut, and probiotic has the most comprehensive functions with low cost, obviously the best choice. Probiotic is in fact, all around us in daily life, such as yogurt, wine, bread and so on, also used very broadly for agricultural and industrial purposes, but we will focus on one thing here - how we can use probiotic solutions to help animal farming business.  

So, first things first, lets learn what is probiotic, here is a most accepted definition: “live microorganisms which when administered in a adequate amounts of beneficial microorganisms, confer a health benefit on the host. Some contain metabolites or add beneficial growth promoting factors, which have the functions of maintaining the micro-ecological balance of both internal and external environment of the plants, animal and human body, improving health and protect the environment.”Here are the key words, the effective probiotic should firstly be live, dead bacteria is no good;

Secondly, must be used in adequate amount, insufficient dosage will not work well;

Third, it has to be beneficial bacteria, harmful or pathogenic bacteria is the foe of probiotic;

Fourth, the core mechanism of probiotic is maintaining the balance of microflora, we know, everything in our world is about balancing, both physical and spiritual, all lives, relationships, the eco-system, and so on, just think about it, probiotic works the same way.

Next, I will talk about the relationship between anitbiotic and probiotic, the first thing we should know is these two are not good friends, they don’t get along because antibiotics will wipe out both good and bad bacteria in gut, and their mechanisms are very different, some would say “I prefer antibiotics, it’s necessary for me to avoid massive casualties when my livestock get sick, its very bad for business, so if I use antibiotic, I can’t use probiotic.” Well, its very much understandable but not 100% correct... massive loss of livestock is indeed devastating, especially for small farms, this is exactly where the probiotic can provide big help -- to prevent this from happening in the first place, by improving immunity and overall health, animals don’t easily get sick, or, don’t get too sick, so it would be much easier and less expensive for us to cure them.

Furthermore, probiotic is in fact compatible with antibiotics, for example, probioitcs help animals quickly back to health and recover from side effects caused by antibiotics, they can work along, not together, but taking turns, normally few days gap. So, using antibiotics sometimes would be a necessary solution but probiotic is truly a better way.  I have listed some key differences for probiotics and antibiotics, so we will have a clear understanding of the idea.

First, probiotics can be applied daily to improve or maintain overall health of the animals, where antibiotics are only used when sick.

Second, Probiotic is risk free, and almost all antibiotics have side effects, such as wiping out both good and bad bacteria in animal gut, causing imbalance of intestinal microflora, lead to intestinal problems such as diarrhea, enteritis, constipation, resulting high FCR, low growth rate, even death.

Third, Probiotic is high value-added solution because it will increase the profitability of animal farming business by improving productivity - higher growth rate, more and better meat&milk production, better egg laying rate, lower FCR and so on. Also by improving the immunity and overall health of animals, farmers will save money on antibiotics. In the other hand, people use antibiotic to reduce the potential loss, like the fire fighters, no matter how fast they put the fire out for you, there would still be some losses. The best to do is to prevent the fire in the first place.

Fourth, Probiotic is environment friendly and also no drug residue, antibiotic in the other hand, the drug residue will stay in the meat and pass on to humans, making humans to develop drug resistance, when people get sick, the antibiotics will be less effective, and also create some super bacteria with very high drug resistance. This is actually a real world problem, taking China as example, where in past decades, heavy use of antibiotics in animal farming has already caused big trouble for public health, so that Chinese government in past few years has carried out more and more strict policies to control the usage of antibiotics in animal farming, some antibiotics are completely forbidden, and this is the general trend of the animal health market now, everyone has been very keen to find alternative for antibiotics. The market speaks the truth indeed, probiotic solutions are becoming more and more accepted and the demand is soaring high in China, not only in animal farming business, but also in human health, agriculture and environment protection.

Fifth, Probiotic is multi-functional, where antibiotic often have one targeted function.

The glorious era of antibiotics will be gone and the future belongs to probiotics.