February 8, 2021

Aviagen shares how it is keeping ahead of current challenges in poultry health

Blanket bans on poultry imports have resulted from recent avian flu outbreaks in Europe and Asia, and global breeding company Aviagen is improving the food security landscape by leading the concept of 'compartmentalisation'.

Aviagen tells eFeedLink that in fact, they are the first breeding company to have multiple supply bases certified for compartmentalisation. This means that, in times of bird illness in a particular region, Aviagen can continue to export breeding stock from 'compartments', or a group of farms that have been inspected by government officials and determined to be disease-free, physically isolated from surrounding poultry populations and managed according to an intense biosecurity programme. To date, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Colombia, India, and Turkey that have been approved for compartmentalisation.

However, breeding companies can ship only to importing countries which recognise the status. Therefore, Aviagen encourages its trading partners to consider compartmentalisation as a way to improve security in the supply of breeding stock.

From a broader angle, the company understands the importance of health and biosecurity and that keeping pathogens out of the food chain begins with the primary breeder.

In November last year, Aviagen expanded its Elkmont diagnostic laboratory in the US, which is one of the company's seven labs strategically positioned throughout the world. These labs support Aviagen's significant investment in positioning production facilities close to its key markets and customers in more than 100 countries, along with parallel pedigree breeding programmes in the US and UK, and supply bases on six continents.

Controlling the risk of disease infection in its internal breeding flocks, the state-of-the-art labs meet all regulatory and international quality authorisations needed to conduct official health testing, ensuring that breeding stock and hatching eggs can be sold within the country and exported to other countries.

Meeting both short and long-term breeding goals

Under the current COVID-19 environment, commercial farms in general are very concerned about their immediate production costs and bottom line. Accordingly, Aviagen recognises that in the short-term, factors such as flock management, nutrition, and biosecurity can have as much impact on individual flock performance — and cost — as that of genetics. For this reason, the company continually shares the latest management advice with its customers and distributors, including through numerous virtual meetings in the new normal.

As for its long-term breeding goals, Aviagen's balanced breeding programme prioritises areas such as biological efficiency, meat quality, bird health and welfare, and reproductive fitness. The company has improved all of these traits over the past decades and will continue to do so going forward. Aviagen believes that a broad breeding goal is key to contributing to the long-term sustainability of the poultry sector as a whole.

The company adds that environmental sustainability traits will continue to increase in importance as part of the overall breeding goals in the future. These traits also interlink with the social sustainability of producers across many parts of the globe. For example, poultry, with its scalability of production, high throughput, and excellent feed efficiency, presents a value proposition for farmers and consumers in both established and emerging markets.

Farming smartly supports customers, today and tomorrow

While the post-pandemic world will bring about new challenges, Aviagen sees these challenges as opportunities for continuous improvement and increased efficiencies. Importantly, the company has made significant investment in farm intelligence across its operations, involving various departments including information technology, R&D, production, and technical operations.

Also known as "smart farming", farm intelligence combines new innovations and observation methods with data science. Innovative farming tools, such as big data and sensors, enable farm data to be collected in real time, and the data analysed to achieve optimal flock performance. The result is considerable progress in bird health, welfare, and biosecurity, along with huge economic benefits for farmers in ways that were never before possible. Likewise, smart farming enables Aviagen to address critical consumer issues such as environmental sustainability and food chain transparency.

By leveraging smart farming techniques, Aviagen believes it is well positioned to help put healthy, affordable, and sustainable #FoodOnEveryTable (in the words of the British Poultry Council) of families around the globe for today and tomorrow.