The following item was provided to a UK distributor of BACT-A-CID for promotional purposes. It is written to try to explain the mode of action in feed acidifiers and to clarify the position of BACT-A-CID in relation to several competitor products being sold without any technical support.

PASS THE VINEGAR?

Acidification is a word everyone uses, but not everyone understands. In fact many people believe that just adding acid to feed will somehow solve all the animal health problems we encounter every day. Needless to say this is not true, any more than adding vinegar to your chips will make you fit and healthy.

Vinegar contains acetic acid, an organic acid like formic, propionic and lactic acids. It is highly digestible like the lactic acid we find in yogurt. So the animals will digest all the acids we give them, unless we add so much that we make the feed unpalatable.

Some years ago, Agil, a specialist British feed additive manufacturer, addressed this problem and came up with a unique and effective answer. The reason we need to feed acid to commercially produced animals, is to help the gut to fend off advances from pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella. However, it is not a simple matter to acidify the gut of a pig with a couple of kilos of product in a Tonne of feed. In fact, the acid we add will have no detectable effect on feed pH.

So why do we do it? When we wean pigs, they are too young and their digestive tract is too immature to fend for itself, when they are growing they are eating more food than they could ever expect to find in the wild. The gut is therefore stressed and acid levels fall. As acid levels decrease so the pH rises and this allows the growth of the pathogens such as E. coli.

Controlling gut pH is a bit like making silage. When we cut grass, we need something to happen to it, to stabilise it over the winter. What actually happens is that we may add acids or acid producing bacteria to the grass. This helps to convert plant sugars to lactic acid which pickles the crop without a significant loss of energy. This keeps spoilage bacteria away.

How do we do it? In the gut we can do the same thing, we supply a bit of acid which we have to protect from digestion with a mineral carrier which acts like an indigestible sponge. This sponge can be colonised by the acid producing bacteria which we want to encourage. The sponge carries the acid and the good bacteria which grow on it, safely to areas of the gut which could not be reached by liquid or powders alone.

These bacteria use sugars in the feed to produce a more acidic environment that we typically find in healthy animals and these acids keep the development of potential pathogens at bay.

What is the product? The product used is called BACT-A-CID. It is a well proven product that can be used in place of many of the traditional antibiotic regimes that are now showing high levels of resistance. For example in 1998, over 80% of all Salmonella isolated from pigs were resistant to CTC.

The acids supplied also work in a more direct way. They have a direct effect by preventing contamination of stored feed by enteropathogens such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter jejuni.

BACT-A-CID is a granular product that is non corrosive and easy to handle in home mix situations. It is ideal for hand addition to small batches and can seriously improve performance without resorting to antibiotics.

Murray J Hyden 20th June 2000