Scaling Novel Crops for Animal Feed Markets: Lessons Learned from Canola

MBOLD is exploring avenues to reduce the environmental footprint of animal agriculture as one part of our Protein Catalyst initiative. A key focus is expanding and diversifying the crops used in animal feed, creating new opportunities for both feed users and growers while strengthening the resilience of agricultural systems.

We’re pleased to share our new case study examining how canola evolved from a crop grown on limited acreage and used mainly as an industrial lubricant into one of the world’s most widely used animal feed ingredients. The report traces the highly coordinated scientific, organizational, and market efforts that enabled canola meal to gain broad acceptance across livestock sectors. As the report notes, “the transformation of rapeseed into canola… required decades of coordinated public research, deliberate industry/sector organization, strategic branding, and sustained market development.”

The assessment highlights the strategies that shaped canola’s success, from breeding innovations and feeding trials to deliberate and sustained collaboration among animal nutritionists, researchers, farmers and industry players across the value chain. Canola’s evolution and ultimate success offers many practical insights for accelerating commercialization of emerging sustainable feed ingredients. You can check out the full report here.

A special thanks to AURI for preparing this report and to the McKnight Foundation and Builders Vision for their support.

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