PRECISION FEEDING TECHNOLOGY IN BROILER PRODUCTION – THE NEED OF TIME
- PRABAKARAN AND K. SHIBI THOMAS,
Livestock Farm Complex,
Veterinary College and Research Institute,
Orathanadu-614 625
Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (TANUVAS)
Modern broiler chickens grow at a faster rate and their nutrient requirements change daily throughout their production cycle. But in commercial practice they have only 3 or 5 phased feeding regimen. During the majority of the days in production cycle nutrients are often under or over supplied to the birds.
As the nutrient requirements of the birds are not accurate enough, either under-nutrition results in depressed growth or over-nutrition results in inefficient usage of nutrients and also increased feed cost.
PRECISION FEEDING
Precision nutrition is the practice of modifying and feeding diets to make sure that the dietary nutrient supply matches the nutrient requirement of the birdson a daily basis. Precision feeding is the ability to precisely measure the amount of feed delivered to chickens, and hence accurately calculate feed intake and feed conversion ratio. It prevents the under and over-feeding of birds which is amajor drawback in standard phase-feeding systems consisting of three to five diets. It includes increased flexibility to manage abrupt environmental or market changes, and the ability to alter diets on a farm by farm level in a large, integrated operation
TURN OVER TO PRECISION FEEDING TECHNOLOGY
Significant degree of automation, accuracy in feed consumption data, feed storage and feed transport is required to install precision feeding system. Electronic feed weigher provides precise feed weighing, monitoring and blending capabilities.
Basic feed weighing systems that already exist in broiler sheds can be organized in such a way, that 2 or 3 silos each having an auger separately which connects to a hopper on the input side of the scale. Thus, if the augers are calibrated to deliver a certain amount of feed, simple feed weighing equipments can be used to blend and deliver feed to the feed lines. Multiple augers can also be connected to a hopper so that many ingredients can be included and mixed in a proper ratio.
KEY FACTORS OF PRECISION FEEDING TECHNOLOGY
Successful implementation of precision nutrition for poultry involves three key factors
- Accurate ingredient characterization
The nutrient specifications of feed ingredients can vary according to the management system followed, year of production and environmental conditions. Near-infra red spectroscopic feed analysis can estimate the nutrient composition of feed stuffs in a rapid and accurate manner. The accuracy and the potential variability of the arrived results can be determined using standard deviation. The standard deviation of the data, taken from the data bases compiled using large sample numbers, allow nutritionists to measure the uncertainty that exists within the data. It is fed into feed formulation programs to formulate diets to the particular level of certainty.
- Identification of daily requirement of broilers
Various studies have been carried out already to quantify the requirements of nutrients for broilers. This data may be fed into modelling tools such as the EFG broiler growth model or may be more simply used by fitting curves to the identified nutrient specification over the starter, grower, finisher and withdrawal phases in order to identify the daily requirement.If more data points known then the fit of the regression will be better and hence the more successful the precision feeding regime. Estimation of each birds nutrient intake and requirement can also be done by using sensors, scales, cameras or other technologies that monitor feed intake, body weight, growth rate, feed conversion ratio and health status
- Designing the feeding regime
Feeding regime has to be designed to meet the daily needs of broilers. Itinvolve pelleting and feeding a new diet each day to precisely match requirements.An energy dense and a protein dense dietary components are blended using modern feed delivery systems to achieve the optimal digestible lysine to energy intake ratio across the entire production cycleAs only two dietary components are used in the process, the profitability of this regime would not be hindered by the practicalities of pelleting multiple different diets, feed transportation and storage.
Dietary changes may be implemented throughout the production cycle . Some system use infrared sensors to monitor the temperature of the bird and adjusting the feed energy content, while other use near infrared spectroscopy to analyse nutrient composition and adjust feed ingredients.
Diets containing high levels of protein are reported to have a higher heat increment than those containing high levels of carbohydrate or fat . Thus, diets may be blended to reduce the heat increment by decreasing the high protein component of the diet,to compensate for the birds with heat stress
ADVANTAGES OF PRECISION FEEDING SYSTEM
- Precision feeding increased feed efficiency by 4.6 %
- Precision feeding of broiler breeders was demonstrated to reduce variation in flock uniformity to less than 2%
- It ensures reproductive success with consistent flock uniformity that may worth the initial outlay and the return on investment will continue. It may also have bird welfare advantages as skip-a-day feeding can be avoided.
- In more favourable growing conditions may be able to generate good performance with slightly reduced dietary nutrient density, and thus reduced diet cost
- When fed excess energy, it is stored as fat, results in decreased meat quality which is prevented in precision feeding system
- When fed excess protein, amino acids are deaminated. It is an energy expensive process and also leads to production of more ammonia which is source of environmental pollution. Precision feeding system avoids these instances
- If amino acids are being deposited more efficiently to muscle rather than being deaminated, and less energy is being converted to fat, a more favourable body composition will be developed where dressed weights and dressing percentage are improved
 CONCLUSION
To meet the rising demand for animal protein globally, precision nutrition along with precision feeding technology are promising to help the broiler industry across the country by reducing the feed cost and increasing the FCR and dressing percentage of meat.
