Dietary fiber (DF) was considered an antinutritional factor due to its adverse effects on feed intake and nutrient digestibility. However, with increasing evidence, scientists have found that DF has enormous impacts on the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) development, digestive physiology, including nutrient digestion, fermentation, and absorption processes of poultry. It may help maintain the small and large intestine’s integrity by strengthening mucosal structure and functions and increasing the population and diversity of commensal bacteria in the GIT. DF is composed of non-starch polysaccharides (NSP), oligosaccharides, and lignin that scape digestion and enzymatic hydrolysis. Increasing DF content benefits digestive physiology by stimulating GIT development and enzyme production. And the inclusion of fiber at a moderate level in diets also alters poultry growth performance. It improves gut health by modulating beneficial microbiota in the large intestine and enhancing immune functions.
Increasing prices and low availability of common feed raw materials resulted in the use of alternative ingredients in animal production. These ingredients are often characterised by a high amount of soluble fibre resulting in lower performance and intestinal health issues that limits their inclusion rate in the diet. Bacillus amyloliquefaciens CECT 5940 (Ba) is a probiotic that can produce various metabolites and enzymes relieving the negative effects of soluble fiber and therefore it allows...
I. INTRODUCTION A shortage and rising cost of major feed ingredients triggers more pressure on local poultry industries to maximize the use of alternative feed ingredients. Cassava is a potential alternative to corn. It is a good source of energy, with 60-70% of starch & 2-4 % of crude fiber (Staack et al, 2019). However, it has low protein (2%) with low methionine content (0.03%) (Morgan and Choct, 2016). When cassava meal is used at a high level, more SBM is needed to meet...
Introduction In developing countries, the poultry industry is experiencing some critical issues with animal feed prices, which are unpredictable in the current scenario, as raw ingredients, primarily corn and soybean, have been increasing in price day by day (Alagawany and Attia 2015). As a result, there is a need to consider some low-cost resources, such as agricultural by-products and other crops, which are significantly less expensive than conventional feed stuff. As a result,...
1. Introduction “Feed-food competition” was defined as “the tensions and trade-offs between two alternative uses for edible crops: direct consumption by humans versus feeding livestock” (1). However, feed-food competition includes the use of production resources, such as land, wild fish, and water, and labor, capital, and ecosystem services. The allocation of these resources between all their possible uses is often determined by which end use is most...
I. INTRODUCTION The continuous genetic improvements are increasing the first commercial egg size produced and extending the production life of the layer hens worldwide. These improvements are related to what happens at rearing and at the start of the production. Early studies showed that while approximately 60 to 75% of the calcium destined for the shell comes directly from intestinal absorption (Driggers and Comar, 1949), up to 36% could be traced to bones (Mueller et al., 1964)....
Long-term feeding of dietary fibre (DF) has been reported to cause erosion of the epithelial cell layer resulting in mucosal damage with a decrease in villus height in the small intestine (Iji et al., 2001). This project studied the long-term effects of low and high levels of soluble DF on gut physiology by comparing transcriptome in the jejunum between groups. We hypothesized that soluble DF would cause an increase in immune system activity and result in an increased inflammatory response...
An estimated 7.3 million tonnes of food waste are dumped annually in Australia, leading to substantial environmental and economic losses (Arcadis, 2019). Additionally, poultry feed represents the majority of production cost. Therefore, an experiment was designed to evaluate food waste as a feed for laying hens. A total of 150 Isa Brown laying hens at 24 weeks of age were allocated to 3 treatments (50 replicates per treatment) on the basis of body weight to maintain uniformity between the...
Nutritional strategies to improve performance of broilers offered reduced crude protein (RCP) diets supplemented with crystalline amino acids are of interest to the poultry industry. We hypothesized that the dietary inclusion of moderate amounts of insoluble fibre would stimulate gizzard function and increase the retention time of digesta in the foregut allowing more time for exogenous protease to act on their substrates leading to greater digestibility of protein/amino acids and better...
There is continued interest in using sorghum as an alternative to wheat in Australian poultry diets, but there is concern about the comparatively lower digestibility of sorghum-based diets. This study examined if it is possible to accelerate sorghum digestion in young birds by targeting fermentation of the xylan in its endosperm cell walls. The hypothesis was that supplementing sorghum-soybean meal based diets with a combination of xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS), xylanase and wheat bran would...
Recent studies have shown that the decreased performance of broilers associated with feeding a reduced crude protein (RCP) diet cannot be fully recovered by supplementing essential amino acids (Hilliar et al., 2019). We hypothesized that the dietary inclusion of moderate amounts of insoluble fibre would improve gizzard function and protein/amino acid digestibility that could help to restore the performance loss associated with feeding a RCP diet. This study investigated the effects of oat...
INTRODUCTION It is imperative to identify factors that inhibit the digestibility of nutrients for successful commercial poultry production. The non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) like substances of hemicellulose, cellulose, and pectin can reduce nutrient digestibility in poultry (Choct, 1999). Among the NSP, β-mannans are a group of hemicelluloses, which are present in many ingredients used for poultry feeds like soybean and other leguminous seeds. It occurs in the forms of...
The IGP Institute is conducting a market intelligence survey to collect information on the current usage, processing, and purchasing of grain sorghum in animal nutrition from different places around the world. The objective is to get data that can help us identify the technical areas where there...
Introduction High cost of conventional ingredients such as maize as source of energy, soybean, groundnut cake and fish meal as source of protein in broiler’s diet has increased the cost of feed and consequently increased cost of production (Attia, 2015). The cost of feed represents about 75% of the total costs of animal production. Also, non-availability and competition existing among man, industry and livestock have necessitated the need to find cheap and available...
Fibre is a nutrient that has been largely ignored in feed formulation, not because it is unimportant, but because it is not well known what ‘fibre’ actually stands for. Firstly, the terms used to describe fibre in feed are confusing and the values they represent are inaccurate. For instance, ‘crude fibre’ is a 19th century relic that does not mean much in monogastric animal nutrition. Its continued use in feed formulation perhaps represents the single largest source...
The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of feeding xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS), xylanase (XYL) and fermentable fibre, in the form of wheat bran (WB), on egg quality. It is theorised that WB stimulates and trains the microbiota in the hindgut to hydrolyse and ferment dietary xylan, and XOS and XYL may further upregulate xylan fermentation pathways, resulting in improved nutrient utilisation and thus egg quality. Isa Brown hens (n = 96 hens) were obtained at peak lay (39 weeks of age)...
I. Introduction Necrotic enteritis (NE), caused by Clostridium perfringens (CP) and exacerbated when birds are co-infected with Eimeria spp., is one of the most severe and common diseases resulting from intestinal mucosal damage (Bae et al., 2021). The stimbiotic (STB) concept has been recently introduced as a non-digestible and fermentable additive that stimulates the development of a microbiome comprising bacterial species that are principally involved in fibre...
INTRODUCTION Chicken meat consumption has drastically increased in the past decades, and Australia has the fourth highest consumption of chicken meat in the world, eating 47.64 kg/person in 2020 (ACMF, 2021). The success of the poultry industry is highly related to the improved growth and performance capabilities of chicken meat birds with some strains of broilers capable of reaching market weight by 35 d of age (Singh et al., 2021). The industry now requires new approaches to...