How to alleviate heat stress in poultry

Oscar Briceño Unless something has changed in the last decade or so, you can't. I did my PhD in methionine for pigs, and had a whole section on methionine alternatives in my first chapter.

It was hypothesized that as a methyl-donor, betaine could spare methionine (itself a major methyl donor). In vitro liver homogenate trials showed some potential. However, when tested in vivo, my recollection is that it never worked all that well. When it did appear to work, it was generally concluded that it did so by regenerating methionine from homocysteine (HCY) after a methylation reaction.

From my thesis:

"Another approach to capitalize on the transmethylation cycle has been the
addition of methyl donors to maximize the efficacy of Met regeneration from Hcy.
Betaine is a metabolic derivative of choline that can be used to re-methylate Hcy to Met
via the betaine-homocysteine methyl transferase (Figure 1 – 1). Supplementation of
betaine to human patients with chronic renal failure has been shown to decrease
circulating Hcy levels (McGregor et al., 2002).

Although there is evidence that betaine can improve the conversion of Hcy to Met
(Baker & Czarnecki, 1985), the evidence for a direct betaine-Met sparing effect in
poultry is far less encouraging. Betaine has shown no effect on growth performance
(Rostagno et al., 1996; Schutte et al., 1997; Esteve-Garcia and Mack, 2000) and little
(Schutte et al., 1997) to no effect on breast meat yield (Rostagno et al., 1996; Esteve-
Garcia and Mack, 2000). In swine, the evidence for some sort of betaine effect is
slightly more positive. Matthews et al. (2001) found that although betaine did not spare
Met, feeding betaine increased ADG due to an increase in ADFI. Lawrence et al. (2002)
reported increased ADG in higher CP (15%) diets supplemented with 1 g-betaine/kg diet
and reduced average fat depth in barrows. Despite some small improvements in certain
performance criteria in response to betaine, it would appear as though betaine is not
capable of sparing Met in swine or poultry diets."

Aminu Abdullahi Umar
Perfect Mr. Aminu for your further explanation and that is exactly what I mean because Betaine a trimethyl donors, can partially replace methionine to as much as10% when used at say 750gr per ton of ration, and at this level, may completely replace Choline chloride in ration
Betaine dosages vary and depend on the objective of the your treatments
In most trials, Betaine is owed to manage heat stress between 0.05% to 0.4% in feed with obvious advantages, however when Betaine is used on the high level if 750gram -800gram per ton, methionine could be reduced by 10%-15% while choline chloride may be totally removed in such level of application
Many trials to confirm this had been reported from Asia countries and from many researchers working on Betaine, methionine and choline chloride.
Thank you Abdulahi Umar for sharing your valued knowledge.
Livestock industry foundation for Africa (LIFA,) has as one of its initiatives the management of climate change vulnerabilities to livestock and mostly poultry production of the South Sahara Africa.
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