Project Description

PLANTIBIOTICS aims to put in the market an innovative functional ingredient obtained from the refinement of vegetable waste.

Provalor has obtained a functional extract from fermented vegetable remnants through their ad-hoc exclusive methodology. When included as a functional ingredient in pig feed in an amount of 0.02-0.05%, it promotes agglutination of hazardous bacteria in the pig’s gut, allowing them to get expelled with the faeces, minimising illnesses and reducing the necessity of the use of antibiotics.

Antibiotics are a key tool against infectious bacterial diseases. The use of sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics in food-animal feeds (growth promoters) has become a very common practice to prevent animals from catching diseases and to improve production performance in intensive animal husbandry, but this practice has been banned since 2006. This is a big issue, in the EU and worldwide, and great effort is being put to find viable alternatives. Actually, there is a recently constituted Focus Group within EIP-AGRI, dedicated to “Reducing antibiotic use in pig farming”. They encourage to “further examine use of plant-based pig feed additives”.