August 3, 2009

Researchers from the French National Institute For Agricultural Research (INRA) have developed a feed strategy to boost broiler leg strength.

 

Lameness in broiler chickens reduces welfare as well as product quality and profitability. Leg disorders, which are caused by bone and joint infections as well as skeletal abnormalities, are a result of a fast growth rate during the first few weeks of life. The fast growth placed abnormally high loads on relatively immature bones and joints, causing skeletal abnormalities.

 

A solution to this issue is to design a feed strategy that can reduce growth at this early stage, so that lameness and animal welfare can be improved significantly.

 

The key challenge is to reduce growth without hurting flock performance, and it is discovered that this could be done without any reduction in final carcass weight by using a combination of two diets and a sequential feeding method, said Christine Leterrier of the INRA.

 

The research team recommends a 48-hour feeding cycle with two diets instead of the traditional continuous distribution of a single diet.

 

For the first seven days of life, broiler chicks should be fed a standard starter diet. Then, from day eight to day 28 the diets should rotate every 24 hours between a low energy, high protein (E-P+) diet and a high energy, low protein (E+P-) diet.

 

Following this, birds should then be given a standard finishing diet from day 29 onwards.

 

This feed regime not only reduce lameness rate, but also maintained standard slaughter weight without any additional feeding days, Leterrier said.

 

For this to work, the E-P+ diet should contain about 97 percent of the energy and 121 percent of the protein of a standard diet while the E+P- diet should be 103 percent of the energy of a standard one with 79 percent of the protein. The low energy diet should be given first in order to avoid any reduction in body weight at slaughter.

 

Another advantage was that the cost of the sequential diet may be lower than a standard diet, as it can contain more cost effective protein-rich feeds such as rapeseed and DDGS. This is because rapeseed meal and DDGS can effectively replace other more expensive protein rich feeds in the E-P+ part of the cycle.