Article published the October 13, 2025
Zinc (Zn) is a fundamental trace mineral for growth, development and health in broilers. The form of Zn has a direct impact on its biological function in broiler chickens (Bun et al., 2011). Hydroxy forms, Zn hydroxychloride (IBZ) can potentially offer advantages over other inorganic and organic sources. This study was designed to determine the optimum level of IBZ in broiler diets, by evaluating ...
Article published the October 13, 2025
I. INTRODUCTIONNecrotic enteritis (NE) is of great concern to the poultry industry due to its deteriorating impact on production and increasing mortality, resulting in a US$6 billion global economic loss (Wade and Keyburn, 2015). The causative agent of NE is Clostridium perfringens, a gram-positive spore-forming anaerobic bacterium. The subclinical form of NE is financially more devastating than t ...
Article published the July 15, 2025
Meat and bone meal (MBM) is a valuable source of protein, calcium and available phosphorus for broiler diets (Anwar et al., 2016). The use of MBM in broiler diets at levels above 50 g/kg minimizes the need for inclusion of inorganic P, thus reducing feed cost. Potential indigestibility of protein in MBM (Kim et al., 2012) may act as a predisposing factor for necrotic enteritis (NE). Increased prod ...
Article published the June 23, 2025
Low protein diets are being investigated to reduce feed cost and address health, welfare and environmental concerns associated with feeding meat chickens excess dietary crude protein (CP). Low CP diets supplemented with only essential amino acids (AA) have failed to improve performance to that observed with standard CP diets (Dean et al., 2006). The nonessential amino acid glycine (Gly) is believe ...
Article published the June 23, 2025
I. INTRODUCTIONNSP refer to a wide variety of polysaccharide molecules of cell walls with varying degrees of water solubility, size and structure. Their physiological functions are defined by whether they are water soluble or insoluble. The amount of soluble and insoluble NSP varies greatly among different ingredients; for example, corn and sorghum contain very low levels of NSP but wheat, rye and ...
Article published the December 4, 2024
Flock uniformity is crucial to increase the performance and profitability of commercial egg production (Corzo et.al, 2004). Obtaining flock uniformity in a free-range system may be challenging due to the variation in feeding and ranging behaviour of individual birds.The current study investigated the effect of body weight on initial range utilization and flock uniformity in two free-range laying f ...
Article published the June 24, 2024
Copper (Cu) is a vital element involved in cellular metabolism and enzyme systems. At levels greater than nutritional requirements, dietary Cu addition enhances growth performance as a growth promoter (Pesti and Bakalii, 1996). Copper dosing at levels up to 250 mg/kg feed has been shown to improve intestinal structure and function, and alter the intestinal microbiota profile (Di Giancamillo et al. ...
Article published the January 17, 2024
I. INTRODUCTIONThe quality of poultry feed and litter are important for maintaining and improving poultry production. Poultry feed (raw materials and formulated diet) is highly variable and large safety margins are needed to buffer the nutritional variability in feed ingredients when formulating diets (Moss et al., 2021). Feed ingredients delivered to feed mills are not comprehensively analysed us ...
Article published the September 27, 2023
Hydroxychloride trace minerals (HTM) have covalent bonds and thus are less reactive both in the feed and in the digestive tract compared to inorganic trace minerals, which contain ionic bonds (ITM) such as sulphate forms. Therefore, HTM may have higher bioavailability than ITM.This study aimed to evaluate the effects of replacing sulphate forms of zinc (ZnSO4), manganese (MnSO4) and copper (CuSO4) ...
Article published the September 11, 2023
I. IntroductionTypical Australian broiler diets contain 2.5-3.0 g/kg phytate-P or roughly 10.0 g/kg phytate; therefore, phytase is included into every Australian broiler diet. As phytase is capable of increasing the availability of phosphorus, calcium, sodium, amino acids and energy content of diets, these nutrients may be decreased in the feed formulations as ‘matrix values’ without a ...