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ANIMAL HEALTH

Livestock health is critical for food safety, farm productivity, and climate resilience.

Healthy livestock grow more efficiently, require fewer resources, and produce lower emissions per unit of food. Good animal care supports farmer livelihoods and a safe, affordable supply of milk and dairy products, meat, seafood, eggs, honey as well as the myriad of non-food items made from livestock such as insulin.

Adequate nutrition aims at maintaining animals in good health, supporting their resilience to various stressors. Improving animal health through disease prevention, early detection, treatment of illness, alongside access to veterinary care, is central to achieving environmental and social goals.

Yet today, only 0.01– 0.02% of climate finance goes to livestock health, underscoring the need to align investment with impact potential.

Improving animal health through disease prevention, early detection, treatment of illness, alongside access to veterinary care, is central to achieving environmental and social goals.

 

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PhytoComplexes are one example of what's possible when humans learn from natural wisdom.

SKRETTING’S PHYTOCOMPLEXES LEARNING FROM NATURE TO BUILD ANIMAL RESILIENCE

There’s a tension in modern animal production systems. On one hand, producers must deliver high performance and consistency under increasingly demanding conditions ranging from genetic intensification to climate-driven stressors such as rising temperatures and fluctuating oxygen levels. On the other, biological systems are inherently complex, adaptive, and sensitive to disruption. Solutions that focus narrowly on single causes or single compounds can struggle to deliver durable results in such environments.

Skretting’s advanced PhytoComplexes emerged from a different starting point: the recognition that nature has spent millions of years balancing complexity. In that balance is health, whether at an individual animal level or an ecosystem level.

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System Map

Animal health:
Livestock health

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Health is an emergent property of well-supported systems.

Think of healthy gut microbiomes that enable animals (including humans) to digest food properly so nutrients are well extracted and absorbed.

Gut health is one of the metabolic pathways improved by feeding advanced PhytoComplexes.

Others include immune function and inflammation levels.

These are all leading indicators for the overall health of an animal.

To create advanced PhytoComplexes which support healthy systems, Skretting draws on both traditional plant wisdom and cutting-edge science.

Skretting looks across the full diversity of the plant kingdom - roots, leaves, fruits, and less-studied plant parts - to leverage existing complex combinations of bioactive compounds found in whole plants.

Many of the plant ingredients explored have never before been used in animal feed, yet they deliver dramatic and consistent results when assessed systematically.

In short, instead of conventional focus on extraction of individual oils or molecules, the emphasis here is on whole-plant-animal functionality and synergy.

Supporting these metabolic pathways in this way is relatively new in animal nutrition, it’s a shift from focusing on narrow intervention points to holistic performance.

This approach has measurable outcomes.

For example, modern poultry genetics are well adapted for rapid growth, but there has also been an increase in physiological demands, particularly around muscle metabolism and inflammatory control.

When advanced PhytoComplexes crafted from four distinct plant materials are fed to those broilers there is a set of targeted-release butyrates.

Commercial trials demonstrated a 100-gram increase in final body weight and a 5.9 point improvement in feed conversion ratio.

This directly supports farm economic health.

Similar robust success has been seen in aquaculture.

As mentioned, PhytoComplexes also support immune function, or susceptibility to disease.

They are an emerging as a valuable preventative health approach; part of a broader health strategy that includes macro- and micronutrient balance, good management practices, and responsible health interventions when needed.

As animals become unhealthy, even if they are in early phases of fighting off illness, there can be significant drops in feed conversion.

This ripples into resource use efficiency and eventually farm profits.

PhytoComplexes’ primary contribution lies upstream: prevention rather than cure.

They are not intended as replacements for veterinary treatments or antibiotics.

Providing treatment to sick animals is important for maintaining animal welfare and preventing mortality.

By strengthening animals before stressors or disease take hold, PhytoComplexes reduce the need for treatment which improves animal welfare and farm economics.

But it helps something else which is an increasing concern in high-intensity production systems: antibiotic resistance.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” says the adage. And it tends to hold true. Preventative measures like PhytoComplexes can help reduce the treatments burden on antibiotics which reduces antibiotic resistance rates that drive up disease susceptibility.

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IN CONCLUSION

PhytoComplexes are a micro-demonstration of exactly what’s needed in a wider sustainability (economic, environmental and social) context. That is, a holistic health approach that prevents problems from surfacing in the first place (mitigation); and addresses them swiftly and effectively when they do (adaptation).

We see clearly that prevention has a far higher return on investment versus paying for treatment while trying to recuperate lost progress while an animal/ecosystem is sick and is struggling to recover.

But prevention can be hard to justify because “What if an animal never gets sick?” “What if environmental degradation never affects my business?” But as every farmer knows, some animals will get sick. And as 99% of scientists know, our environment is getting very sick, and there are no antibiotics for aquifers without water in them, or massive wildfires, or record-breaking heat.

AThe good news is that this approach to advanced PhytoComplexes reminds us that there are powerful mechanisms for systemic improvement that cut across many challenges simultaneously. What it takes is rather than trying to override biological ecosystems, we apply our science to learn how we can support nature’s healthy equilibrium. After all, health is not a single outcome but an emergent property of well-supported systems.

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