Mark Dunlop

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 ...

1. IntroductionThe occurrence of ‘wet litter’ in meat chicken sheds is associated with concerns regarding animal welfare, flock health, food safety, environmental impacts and reductions in production efficiency. Mitigating wet litter will only be achieved when there is thorough understanding of the multidimensional causal factors. This will require a multidisciplinary approach to under ...

One of the purposes of preheating a broiler house is to insure the litter is properly dried prior to chick placement. Research has shown that the higher the litter moisture level, the higher the level of ammonia production, potential for bacterial growth, paw damage, and likelihood the chicks may be chilled by sitting on cool, damp litter. Furthermore, high litter moisture levels will tend to redu ...