The importance of natural ingredients in pellets
Protein and fat values
Not only in animal nutrition but also in human food as well, it’s in our days common to talk about protein and fat values. It’s something that’s much more in our minds than some decades ago.
Human food is not our specialty, but animal nutrition is, specifically birds. It’s a fact that the amount of nutrients in pellets are very important! But more than that, and what many people forget, is how crucial the source of those nutrients is. It’s not difficult to create a pellet using some basic materials as a base like corn or soya and add some artificial ingredients to get the values that are believed to be the best for the target specie. Well, a pellet like this, when we look at the numbers in the label, seems to be really good.
Pellet
However, the used ingredients to reach these values aren’t similar with what the bird eats in the wild. So it doesn’t only matter what the value of protein is, but also where it comes from. For example, if the main source of our protein in a pellet is from a GMO or a crop, and the pellet is for a carnivore, the intake and usage of that protein will be deficient and not efficient.
It’s all about the natural ingredients. When you choose a pellet for your bird it’s highly recommended to look more at the list of ingredients and not only at the standard values of protein, fat and other nutrients.
Vegetal oil
Another example is when there is vegetal oil added in a food for stilts or sea ducks. They need oil, but it must be from an animal source, like fish for instance. If the added oil will be from plants, their feathers will later be really greasy because their body can’t metabolize this type of oil. That’s why Wisbroek Sea Duck Floating, Wisbroek Micro 22 / 40 and Wisbroek Ibis – Flamingo Floating are coated in high quality fish oil. Besides this it contains EPA/DMA, which are essential fatty acids not produced by the animals. Good for embryo development and it also will prevent heart diseases and promotes a healthy brain.
More than just values
So as you can read it’s much more than just values. A good quality of natural ingredients, and of course adequate to the target specie, can bring much more than just protein, fat etc. Furthermore it can bring some simple things that are often forgotten like taste, smell, coating, but also really important things like the fatty acids I mentioned before!
With this taken in mind, let’s take a look at the final composition of our Wisbroek feeds. We always use natural ingredients in our pellets, in some cases more than 30! But at least so important is that all nutrients are in perfect balance without adding artificial ingredients!
This is the core of the success of Wisbroek pellets. We always use high quality ingredients in every product, thinking all the time on the feeding strategy of the bird in the wild and taking the challenges of breeding them in captivity into considerations. Of course the most important is to keep researching and developing in order to always have the most complete feeds.
