David Wicker Ph. D.

@Paulo Martins , the presence of E. Coli or other pathogens in finished feed indicates that a critical control step, pelleting, had failed or that the feed has become contaminated after the pellet mills indicating poor quality control of the manufacturing process. You are correct that the birds intestine does contain these bacteria and receives these bacteria from many different sources, however t ...

The use of Challenge conditions and coccidiosis challenges in an experiment makes the interpretation of research as it applies to commercial conditions more difficult. I have found that reducing density and feeding a consistently good quality diet will enable a production manager to determine which products work in his operations and the products that give a positive return.

Robert Swick . Excellent comment on sustainability, however do not discount the sustainability of the chemicals used to produce the amino acids and vitamins. Many times the production of these nutrients using chemicals is an integrated operation and they used chemicals (by products) from the production of other products. Many times cyanide and HCl acid are in surplus from other reactions. To get a ...

Andy G Tuazon; Dr. Tuazon, I have not used the Gastec ammonia detector. We have used the following hand held detectors, Drager, PAC 7000, 3-M's Single Gas Detector model 450-455-104 A, and the Honeywell gas detector model 128-266-1-3. These gas detectors are available from the Grainger distribution company 9avaiable on line). All of these models can detect the ammonia, however they assay only for ...

Adam Fahrenholz Dr. Fahrenholz, May I disagree with you on less uniformity ifor feeds for older animals that have a larger meal intake as compared to a chick with a smaller meal intake. I believe that we are not only meeting the animal’s needs, but also we are feeding and altering the entire biome in the animal. A larger animal has the body mass to tolerate variations in meal intake as compared to ...

Ammonia levels are problem in modern poultry houses with South or North American or European production methods. Ammonia can be controlled with very low stocking densities and/ or high ventilation rates and deep litter, however it will difficult to make a profit. Thus Dr. Czarick’s work on continuous detection of ammonia is very important. Our goals are for 10 ppm of ammonia. This level is a ...

Interesting comment about the CV's of mixer tests and the 1985 date for the 10 % CV acceptability. While employed at Degussa, now Evonik in the 1980's mixer profliles were offered as a customer service. At that time a standard was needed to compare for % CV's for mixer profiles. The standard at that time, around 1985, was the Kansas State research on mixer profiles using the QuanTab salt assay. T ...