Integrating Innovation and Sustainability in Livestock Feeding: Impacts on Carcass Traits and Meat Quality
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Products".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2026
Special Issue Editors
Interests: food quality; meat quality; animal feed with by-products; quality control
Interests: physics and chemistry of meat and meat products; sensory analysis of food
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: sheep and goat production; body and carcass in vivo evaluation by real time ultrasonography; carcass and meat quality video image analysis; meat and meat products quality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In recent years, the livestock sector has faced mounting challenges in reconciling high productivity with environmental sustainability and animal welfare. Against this backdrop, animal nutrition has emerged as a key driver of innovation, providing strategies to enhance feed efficiency, optimize resource utilization, and positively impact carcass characteristics and meat quality. These attributes are essential for meeting evolving consumer expectations and maintaining market relevance.
This Special Issue focuses on the role of sustainable feeding practices in shaping production efficiency and the quality of animal-derived products. The use of alternative feed ingredients, functional additives, and precision nutrition approaches has shown promising results in enhancing animal performance and reducing fat deposition, improving tenderness and refining carcass composition. These strategies also play a vital role in developing healthier processed meat products with reduced fat and salt content. Furthermore, sustainable nutritional interventions significantly reduce the environmental footprint of livestock systems by lowering greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing circularity. A deeper understanding of how these nutritional strategies impact animal physiology is essential for maximizing product quality while promoting economic and ecological sustainability.
This Special Issue invites contributions exploring the latest research in sustainable animal nutrition and its effects on carcass traits, meat quality and processed products. We welcome studies that address novel feed ingredients, dietary formulations, functional additives, precision feeding technologies and the physiological mechanisms that underlie the effects of nutrition on meat production.
Dr. Ana Leite
Dr. Sandra Rodrigues
Prof. Dr. Alfredo Jorge Costa Teixeira
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- sustainable
- strategies
- meat quality
- optimizing composition
- replacement
- formulations
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