The Department is the Competent Authority for feed safety. EU legislation seeks to ensure that animal feed does not pose a risk to animal health, public health or the environment, meets the minimum standards prescribed, is accurately labelled, and fully traceable.
Feedingstuffs controls are risk based and include inspections and sampling at all stages of the feed chain, including importation, storage, manufacture, transport and use at farm level.
To date in 2022, 1298 samples were taken by the Department and the results for 22 samples were categorised as out-of-tolerance, which represents c. 1.6% of all samples taken.