Feed & Additive Magazine Issue 3 April 2021

ISSUE FOCUS 34 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE April 2021 About Emily Marshall Marshall graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Biology. Since graduating she has held a number of roles in retail, both commercial and technical, and now works at Alltech as Technical Coordinator for Poultry. Emily works on Alltech’s Gut Health Platform and acts as technical support for Alltech’s European poultry team. taining microbial diversity, promoting good gut health. Historically antibiotics were used to remove unfavourable organisms from the bird, however due to their non-specific nature whilst ‘weeding’ patho- gens other beneficial organisms were also removed. As the gut is recolonised post antibiotic use micro- bial diversity is greatly reduced leading to the issues discussed above which arise from lack of diversity. The ‘Seed, Feed, Weed’ concept is a comprehensive programme developed in order to improve the gut health of birds, whether breeder, broiler or layer. Im- proved performance has been measured across all types of birds, however if good gut health can be established in the breeding population this will provide the biggest benefit to chick and hence bird performance. Poultry meat and eggs are currently experiencing a boom. In order to keep up with production require- ments, birds are often fed protein-rich feed. Due to low retention times, the protein is often not fully digested, meaning that nutrients reach the hindgut. This can then act as a substrate for unfavourable bacteria to replicate, causing dysbacteriosis and gut health issues. Dysbacteriosis is extremely common among all poultry species and is most easily noticed by looking for foamy yellow/orange caecal droppings in the shed. One means of monitoring gut health is by using Alltech’s new Manure Online Scoring Sys- tem, which enables producers to easily compare shed to shed, or even variation within sheds through time. As discussed, gut health is the limiting factor in per- formance, so careful consideration should be given to improve it. It is extremely difficult to manage some- thing without first monitoring it, requiring a system to be implemented to measure, monitor and maintain gut health status. Improving gut health will benefit overall health status, and there are many means to do so. Man- agement practices, such as ventilation and heating, are key to enabling optimal gut health, and programmes such as Seed, Feed, Weed give an all-encompassing and, most importantly, cost-effective way of doing so. Figure 1- shows the effect of feeding MRF products on the structural integrity of the gut. 1- section of intestine from bird fed on MRF product. 2- section of intestine from control group.