The Patent Landscape of Lactic Acid Bacteria for Animal Feed and Silage, 2016–2025: Named Taxa, Disclosed Traits and a Thin Silage-Specific Core

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) drive silage fermentation, yet the technology space recorded in the patent literature remains unmapped. This review analyses 1585 patent documents on LAB for animal feed and silage, retrieved from INCOPAT for 2016–2025 through IPC classes A23K and C12N and the keywords “lactic acid bacteria” and “silage OR feed OR ensiling”, to characterise which taxa are named and which traits are disclosed. Output averaged 141.8, rising from 97 (2016) to 194 (2022); the 2024–2025 fall reflects publication lag. China accounted for 55.7%, but only 16.0% listed two or more co-applicants. Only 139 documents (8.8% of the corpus), even among the 1105 that name silage or feed terms, name silage or ensiling; that record is thin and analysed separately. A total of 1116 documents (70.4%) fell into eight genera, with Lactobacillus sensu lato dominating (n = 689) and Streptococcus (103) and Bifidobacterium (85) following, while only 23 (1.5%) used a genus name introduced by the 2020 reclassification. Technology classes concentrated in A23K (56.8%) and C12N (42.3%). The most cited documents concern strain preservation, phage resistance, and probiotic function rather than silage-specific traits; innovation is broad but skewed towards preservation and delivery, with no filing detected for raw-material adaptation, inter-strain interaction, or biofilm-based colonisation.