Ruminant Nutrition - perspectives and prospects

Abstract

Ruminant nutrition evolved to address the practical needs of domestic ruminant animal agriculture. Over the past century there have been many successes, including amelioration of mineral and vitamin deficiencies in livestock, application of a systematic basis for allocation of feed to ruminant animals and development of an understanding of the complex nature of the nutrient requirements of ruminants. These breakthroughs in understanding have been applied through commercial channels. In many cases the origin of the solution or idea is no longer evident. This "invisibility of success" makes it difficult to readily quantify the benefits of the application of ruminant nutrition to the Australian livestock industries. Nonetheless, a substantial proportion (but less than 75%) of the improvement in productivity in the beef cattle industry has been achieved through improvements in nutrient supply. The future of a practical quantitative science such as ruminant nutrition will continue to be shaped by practical issues such as the production of a desired animal phenotype at the least cost. The nature of the solutions will be contingent upon the measurement systems available. New methods and paradigms such as those implicit in molecular biology will provide ideas for the prediction of phenotypes. It seems inevitable that the science of ruminant nutrition will have to adopt new principles from quantitative genetic sciences to generate a new synthesis of biology that can be used by practitioners of animal production.