All commercial poultry eat with reasonably good precision to balance nutrient intake with requirements. Short term, there can be some variation in feed intake related to local situations, but long-term, the mechanisms of feed intake regulation are quite precise. Matching nutrient needs with intake is an obvious inherent evolutionary necessity to ensure survival and reproduction. A bird’s da...
Feed conditioning before the mash feed passes through the pelletizer is a very crucial point. Conditioning time and conditioning temperature are also very important. Feeder height should not be very comfortable to broiler birds so that they can be craving for feed.
Good topic for discussion 90% producer and user confirmed that pellet feed is better than mash feed because:- 1 pellet feed is cooked feed 2 one pick is complete feed 3 Less time required for consumption 4 less wastage 5 Better conditioning 6 Better gelitnization 7 better and lower FCR Try 2 mm pellet and confirm Regards Drchandra Chandraassociate
The blood composition reflects toxin intake. The quantity & quality of each series is affected. "The hemogram mirrors the soul, the soul resides in the bone marrow."
It is not common to have discussions that bring blood composition data to support some bird health condition, as Dr. Cotter said regarding toxins. I believe that the poultry (broiler, laying hens, and breeder hens) hematology information can come as support to different diagnostics, as it happens in humans and other species, such as horses, dogs, and cats.
@Antônio Mário Penz Junior in DSM, I have been working for the past 5-6 years on exactly this topic, and the results are fascinating. Blood composition tells us an enormous amount about the health, welfare, and nutritional state of the bird. We see surprising amounts of variance, even in plasma analytes such as calcium or sodium, where regulatory mechanisms are quite sophisticated. We are seeing a lot of associations between the blood metabolome and important animal health and nutritional issues, from skeletal abnormalities to enteric problems, acid-base balance to amino acid ratios, etc. I fully agree with you, Mario, that this is a rich area for further study, especially when combined with supervised machine learning and automation.
Dear Aaron! This variability is big in humans, as well. However, based on million of analysis, the doctors can suspect or confirm health condition based on minimum and/or maximum figures. If someone starts collecting published data on chicken blood parameters, we will be able, eventually, to predict future diseases, as it is predicted in human health. Our comments can motivate some of our university colleagues to get students to look on what it was already published, using meta-analysis to relate blood parameters with some production results. Hopefully, this dream can come along, in a nearly future.
@Antônio Mário Penz Junior I fully agree with you. Unfortunately, most published studies in livestock only contain small cohorts of animals and this makes the reference ranges quite unreliable (for now). There are also quite a variety of analytical approaches to measuring haematological features which doesnt help make meta-analysis easy! In human medicine this is very well standardised. What we have done in DSM is to standardise the analytical platform (including sampling strategy, data architecture and workflows, visualisation etc), sample thousands of commercial flocks at different ages, genetics, production systems, geographies, health status etc and then make this available to our customers. We now have a database where we can confidently state whether a bird or a flock are out of range for dozens of key blood analytes e.g. pH, Ca, P, glucose, uric acid, liver enzymes, renal markers, electrolytes, plasma proteins, haemoglobin and many others. We are also using supervised ML to associate these blood biomarker derangements to nutritional and health labels which offers automation and prediction opportunities. I agree with you that this level of insight is really powerful and will only get better as the database grows and expands with new features such as microbiome metagenomics. Very nice to be in touch with you again Mario!
Dear Aaron, be in touch with it is a pleasure for me, as well. Sorry not knowing the 5 to 6 years work of DSM. Congratulation! For sure, in the future, all the data collected will make assumption more precise. I strongly believe on that!
