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Poultry welfare
Proper animal welfare involves providing the proper housing, management, nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling and, when necessary, humane euthanasia. These factors allow for the most optimal and humane growing environment. The concept of animal welfare includes three elements: the bird’s normal biological functioning, its emotional state and its ability to express its natural behaviors. Improving animal welfare can be accomplished through offerings like poultry feed enrichment, which can reduce stress, thereby increasing performance, productivity and profitability. Animal welfare is currently a major requirement for intensive poultry production. Beak trimming, stocking density, free access to feed, heat stress, and air pollutants became important issues, which are regulated in several countries. Animal welfare is observed by watching how birds naturally behave and even by looking at mortality stemming from aggressive behaviors.
I. INTRODUCTION Determination of range usage by hens can be difficult for researchers and free-range egg farmers, particularly usage on the outer sections of the range (i.e., > 50 m from the hen shed). Live counts only give a snapshot of numbers of hens on the range at a defined time point and do not show the frequency of range usage. Camera traps, also referred to as trail cameras and wildlife cameras, are relatively cheap and useful tools that could produce valuable information...
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I. INTRODUCTION The welfare of all farmed livestock is of importance to the consuming public. Australian consumers especially have some concerns about welfare within more intensive animal production systems, such as commercial egg farms (Rachel et al., 2017). Most consider cage-free and free-range production systems to be more `natural` and associate this with `good` animal welfare (Buddle et al., 2021). Commercial egg farms experiencing smothering and mortality events as a result of...
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Quantification of range use in commercial meat chicken flocks is desirable so that farmers can objectively assess meaningful range access, including number of chickens using the range and how far chickens roam from the shed. Currently there is no cost-effective technology for quantifying range use in commercial conditions, and farm staff perform assessments based on visual inspection. A proof-of-concept machine vision system was developed for automated range use assessment, using simple and...
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I. BACKGROUND The scale of the Australian chicken-meat industry has increased at an extraordinarily rapid rate so that now chicken-meat is clearly the first preference of consumers in comparison to pork, beef and lamb. In 1990/91, the Australian population was 17.2 million with a per capita chicken-meat consumption of 23.9 kg; however, this increased by 61.0% to 27.7 million people and consumption increased by 100% to 47.8 kg over the 30 years to 2020/21. As a direct consequence, the...
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Lost in the Market Uncertainty Caused by the Outbreak
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The International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) offers attendees access to the latest in protein and feed technology through exhibits and educational programing. TECHTalks are free, 20-minute technical presentations, offered each day at IPPE. For the 2024 IPPE, 97 presentations will be given in the TECHTalks theaters in the A-Hall at Booth A244, in the B-Hall at Booth B48027 and in the C-Hall at Booth C14185.
The TECHTalks presentations will address many topics, including...
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INTRODUCTION It is essential to maximize poultry production to meet the increasing demand for animal protein due to the increase in global human population (Tona, 2018). One of the major determinants of successful poultry production is the ability to combat environmental stress challenges in broiler chickens. Stress occurs as a result of a biological response to an internal or external stimulus that poses threats to the normal physiological equilibrium of an organism (Elitok,...
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An impact of Deoxynivalenol produced by Fusarium graminearum on broiler chickens
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I. Introduction Early life experiences play an important role in the behavioural development of laying hens (Janczak and Riber 2015; Nicol 2015). Environmental differences in rearing systems have been shown to have an impact on behavioural problems such as feather pecking and cannibalism during adulthood (de Haas et al. 2014; Riber and Guzman 2017). In addition, fearfulness early in life has been shown to correspond to increased stress response in adulthood (de Haas et al. 2012). A...
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I. Introduction In Australia, 95% of the population are concerned about animal welfare with 91% desiring better ways to monitor and improve animal welfare (National pest & disease outbreaks, 2018). There is increased understanding and focus on animals’ sentience and the need to ensure farm animals have ‘lives worth living’. This applies to the Australian egg industry where research shows the community believes that hens are entitled to positive and rewarding...
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Press release - After the successful product launch in France in January, site expansion of a satisfied customer, and more than 23 million eggs scanned; a new installation with three modules of the Genus Focus in-ovo sexing is installed at LOHMANN Deutschland Hatchery,...
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A fast-growing broiler produces a surprising amount of heat, roughly 10 - 15 Btu/hr per pound of body weight. To put this in perspective, a single match produces one Btu/hr of heat which means that a four-pound broiler has essentially 40 to 60 matches of heat being produced within it. An eight-pound broiler would have 80 to 120 matches of heat within it, heat it must continually rid itself of in order to maintain a normal body temperature. As a bird’s body temperature increases,...
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Managing by the “average” of anything can be a potentially dangerous concept when it comes to growing birds. For instance, when tunnel ventilating market-age broilers the average house temperature could be 80°F, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it hides the fact that it could be 70°F at the pad end and 90°F at the fan end of the house which definitely would be dangerous. During cold weather, an average daily relative humidity of 60% seems ideal, but in...
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When it comes to predicting the likelihood that birds will experience heat stress conditions on a given day, knowing outside relative humidity first thing in the morning is not particularly useful. Though air moisture levels have significant impact on bird comfort, relative humidity is constantly changing over the course of a day. In the morning relative humidity will tend to be between 80 and 100%. In the afternoon, as temperatures rise and the moistureholding ability of air increases, the...
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In cage-free housing, multi-tiered aviary structures are often used (pictured above), where key resources (i.e., feed, water, nests, perches) are available on elevated platforms called tiers, and litter substrate is available on the ground floor for dustbathing and foraging. Hens move vertically and horizontally...
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Bio-security is the cheapest, most effective means of disease prevention and control available. Proper bio-security will help to ensure the overall health and welfare of your flock. ...
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Effects of methionine supplement sources and crude protein on broiler performance
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Unlike many aspects of operating a tunnel-ventilated house during hot weather, the performance of an evaporative cooling pad system is relatively predictable. This is because there are well defined relationships between the cooling produced by a pad system and water usage, pad area, outside temperature/humidity, and water temperature. Since most evaporative cooling pads are essentially identical and the summertime conditions are fairly similar across most poultry growing areas of the U.S.,...
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There are essentially two types of poultry house circulation fan systems: vertical and horizontal. In a vertical circulation fan system, fans are located in the center of the house, typically near the ceiling, and are oriented to blow straight down towards the floor. The air then moves across the floor, up the side walls, and back...
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Preventing injury to a chicken’s foot pads (paws) is very important for a number of reasons. First, chicken paws are a valuable product, a delicacy in some cultures, and often sell for as much as two to three times as breast meat on a per-pound basis. Secondly, foot pad lesions can become infected, resulting in leg problems and a decrease in overall bird performance. Last but not least, a chicken’s feet are a good indicator of litter quality. Numerous studies have documented the...
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Annelies Kers (Utrecht University) Knowledge of factors that influence the functioning of gut microbes is essential to improve health and reduce the use of antibiotics in poultry production. The environment, and more specifically housing conditions, can affect the gut microbiome of broiler chickens. The gut microbiome is defined as the collection of all the microorganisms and their “theatre of activity” in the gut environment. Previous...
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Alex Alonso Wang (Big Herdsman) shows their poultry and swine equipment, explaining the features and benefits of the layer cage and the sow pen, during the Avicola Porcinos Expo 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina....
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Christos Gougoulias (Innovad) Modern poultry broiler production strives for the maximum live weight, which can contribute to chronic intestinal inflammation and broader metabolic syndromes. There is thus a need to establish realistic models that help the industry. Several challenge models have been proposed by the scientific community and these include biological agents or pathogens, chemicals, reused litter, and, more recently, different non-starch...
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