Pulse crops in pet food

Pulse crops for pets. CEO of Columbia Grain International, Jeff Van Pevenage talked to me about pulse crops, farming and pet foods.

They're getting protein. You're getting a lot of folic acid, a lot of vitamins, minerals. So about 2005 is when the U.S. really started to ramp up production of peas and lentils. We wanted to create markets. So obviously, some of the jobs of creating markets so we could market these with intent was to find places that could use them and pet food users didn't really look at them because there wasn't enough production accessible where they could create a product and have year round supply of them. So probably about 2000 between 2010 and 2012, pet food companies started buying a lot more and adding these as ingredients into their pet foods because we had enough production to cover both the human and the pet food side of the market. These have tremendous amounts of protein in them generally speaking, peas are about 23, 24 percent protein. So that became a very good source of protein for pet food and it's low cost. So enter those into the pet food market. Jeff’s company is joining in research aimed at discovering the real cause of canine dilated cardiomyopathy.