By Jeff Mulhollem
In poultry houses where broiler chickens — birds bred and raised specifically for meat production — are grown, feed is delivered through long feed lines, which are mechanized systems that automatically deliver feed from storage silos to feeding pans. They run from the front of the houses to the back, and sometimes nutrients become unevenly distributed. This can lead to inconsistent feed quality, which can affect bird growth and health. To help the poultry industry determine the extent of this problem, researchers at Penn State conducted a study of how nutrient distribution affects broiler chicken performance, processing yields and bone mineralization.
“Walking through commercial poultry houses, and looking in the feed pans, seeing what the birds are consuming, we saw a difference in the quality of feed from the front of the house where feed was coming in to the back end of the house,” said John Boney, Vernon E. Norris Faculty Fellow of Poultry Nutrition in the College of Agricultural Sciences, senior author on the paper. “That led us to the question: If we can see a difference in physical quality of the feed — meaning many of the pellets have broken down into fine particles or dust — how does that variability affect nutrition the birds get?”
In findings available online that will publish in the December issue of Journal of Applied Poultry Research, the researchers reported that variability in two key nutrients along the feed line affect broiler chickens’ growth performance, including body weight, feed-conversion ratio, processing yields — like breast meat yield — and bone strength/mineralization. The two key nutrient areas are amino acid density — the amount of essential amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins, in the feed — and Phytase Activity, which is a type of protein called an enzyme responsible for initiating and accelerating necessary biological reactions — that helps chickens absorb phosphorus from plant material.
Source : psu.edu