Ascophyllum Nodosum, the Seaweed Revolutionising Livestock Farming

Animal Health

Ascophyllum Nodosum, or Norwegian Kelp, is nothing short of a gift from nature to help promote positive gut health in commercial livestock farming.

Those of you immersed in the world of poultry, pig, or cattle farming will not have been able to escape the increasing buzz around the uses of seaweed in feed products.

Ekogea’s BioComplex products use a particular form of seaweed, Ascophyllum Nodosum. It’s from this seaweed that we derive feed, sanitisation, and natural health products using our unique extraction process.

But what is Ascophyllum Nodosum, and how does it actually help?

Norwegian Kelp

Ascophyllum Nodosum is actually a fairly common form of seaweed. It grows in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, especially around the Outer Hebrides, where we ourselves source our raw material.

Many of you will have heard its common name, Rockweed or Norwegian Kelp. It has been used for many years now as natural fertilisers or animal feed, or even as packing material to ship Scottish lobster all over the world.

Huge Benefits for Gut Health

The reason Ascophyllum Nodosum is so useful is that it contains more carbohydrate based foods for microbial activity than most other seaweed. These are known as polysaccharides and the smaller oligosaccharides. Under the right extraction process this can then go on to have a prebiotic effect in the guts of livestock. This then promotes the breeding of beneficial gut microflora.

The Ekogea Solution

Where the Ekogea solution comes into its own is in our unique biological extraction process. We isolate and stabilise important polyuronic acid content. This is otherwise lost in many other extraction processes. The polyuronic acid helps buffer harmful gut bacteria, allowing only beneficial bacteria to feed on the oligosaccharides.

These beneficial bacteria then multiply and form the dominant colony in the gut of poultry, pigs, and cows. This leads to happy and healthy animals with better feed conversion ratios and far fewer gut related diseases. This is a significant benefit as we look to move away from the use of antibiotics in livestock farming.