Mike Persia (Virginia Tech) talks about the benefits of Direct-Fed Microbials (also Sulfur Amino Acid supplementation) to help manage the adverse effects of heat stress, in this interview during IPPE 2023 in Atlanta, USA.
Dear Sirs, to combat stress, the herbal mixture C-Power has proven to be a useful additive to combat stress, which can be defined as a stress adaptogen. "Reducing heat stress susceptibility in broilers" Asian Feed Magazine June/July 2021. In Summary C-Power is a natural phytogenic antioxidant that can help meeting nutritional requirement of vitamin C in poultry, and particularly during summer and other stress conditions. In the face of stress challenges, C-Power supplementation helps in ensuring optimal physiological functions, optimal immunocompetence attainment of homeostasis through its adaptogen activity, improvement in production and performance in broilers.
The best alternative is to keep he birds on wirefloor where they do not get litter infection. clean eggs are produced and mechanization possible. increasing the space is a good suggestion. giving up cages totally is suicidal considering the cannabolic endency of birds in large groups
Thanks for the good discussion. I suggest also lowering the antinutritional and allergenics by changing part of the protein source Soybean meal for SPC Soybean Protein Concentrate. This will challenge the gut development less and also increase the whole feed digestibility. Currently, when the Microbiota is becoming in evidence, modulating its patterns to better diversity and consequently higher performance, seems to be a proper strategy.
For birds laying in battery cages the best approach is to decongest number of birds per cell. From 4 or 5 to 2. So that they can have space to flap their wings. The hot period is about 8 weeks. Then have Holden pens to drop the birds outside the battery cages in deep litters. Try to program the birds to start laying two weeks before the end of heat zones. So that they can peak just immediately after the hot period. Then you can reduce mortality of heat and laying stress and have prolonged periods of laying before another heat period. Having water refrigeration facilities to drop the temperature of their water to 10 Deg centigrade will have strong cooling effect on the layers. The nutritional aids are betaine, Vitamin C, Vitamin E goes a long way. For Broilers please in open housing avoid production during heat period or increase their spacing as much as possible. Broilers die a lot even in deep litters. Above all use radiant heat reflectors on the roof of the buildings.
Dietary considerations 1.1 to 1.7 are excellent options.
Addition of plant based products hypo thermic medicines are not useful. Of course keeping the outside temperature is the best solution for birds with no sweat glands
Yes, Dear Bertrand, I agree with you and I have also noticed increased feed intake and feed efficiency when birds are fed during cool hours.
Dr Ram Singh Bibyan