If you can meet the daily nutritional needs of chickens, commercial broilers can achieve a good growth rate. To some extent, the amount of nutrients that a bird needs to obtain daily depends on the nutrients in the diet; however, it is the feed or nutrient intake that the bird really responds to. In order to obtain a good growth rate and effective nutrient use efficiency for the commercial broilers, the key point is that the chicken has a good feed intake. Feed shape has a crucial influence on feed intake. Poor feed forms can inhibit feed intake and negatively affect chicken growth rates. Both the feed nutrient concentration and the shape of the feed are optimized to maximize the intake of feed and to exert the production performance of commercial broilers.
Effect of feed shape on production performance of commercial broilers
In general, feeds fed by modern commercial broiler chickens are granulated. Compared with untreated flour, pelleted poultry feed can increase bird weight gain and improve feed efficiency (Exhibit 1). To some extent, this improvement in performance is due to an increase in feed intake. Feeding pelleted feed to birds also reduces the energy consumption of chickens during the feeding process; therefore, the energy needed for growth and development of chickens increases accordingly.
High-quality pellet feeds increase this benign effect. High-quality pellet feeds should have strong particle persistence and low powder content. Persistence refers to the ability to keep feed pellets intact during feed handling and transportation. Poor persistence of feed pellets can cause particles in the feed to break and gradually increase the fine powder particles in the feed. The gradual increase of powdered fine particles in the feed will affect the growth rate of the flock and increase the feed to meat ratio (see Figure 2).
In order to give full play to the production performance of commercial broilers, the accumulation of fine powder particles in the feed should be reduced as much as possible.
Improve feed conditions
The feed condition, especially the accumulation of fine powder particles in the feed, results in a poor quality of the pellets, which can have a negative impact on the production performance of commercial broilers. The on-site survey results showed that the feed intake of some chickens is only 28-37% of the intact pellets. The poor quality pellet feed is an important factor that hinders the commercial production of broiler chickens to obtain ideal production performance.
How to improve the quality of granular materials?
Factors affecting the quality of the pellets:
Dietary raw materials
Dietary fat content
Dietary grain size
Raw wheat and its wheat by-products have good viscosity properties to obtain better particle quality. The lack of stickiness in corn results in poor pellet quality. The breakage of corn-based formula feed is much more serious than that of wheat-based formula feed. Adding wheat can improve the quality of feed pellets, but it may affect the flexibility of the lowest-cost diet formula.
Dietary fat
Adding more than 2% fat to the feed mixer, especially for corn-based formula diets, will reduce the pellet quality. In any case, a certain amount of fat is allowed in the diet before feed granulation, but it does not affect the pellet quality of the feed.
the size of granule
The general assumption is that grinding the raw material into finer powder particles will increase the quality of the pellet feed; however, such scientific basis is not very clear. The potential benefits of grinding raw materials into finer powders to improve pellet feed quality must be balanced with the increase in energy costs caused by such practices. When the quality of the pellets is poor and the damage to the pellets is more likely to occur, the grinding of the raw materials into finer powders will result in an increase of powdery particles in the feed, which will have a negative impact on the production performance of the commercial broilers.
With respect to feeds that are fed coarser granules, the fact that the granules are too fine can result in increased feed wastage and increased energy consumption during feeding, and intake of nutrient-balanced diets for picky eaters.
Flocks like to feed on coarse-grained feeds rather than on fine-grained feeds, and this preference is often associated with increased feed intake and improved flock production performance (Exhibit 4).
When the quality of the feed pellets is poor and the damage to the pellets occurs, the use of coarser pellets may be beneficial to the production performance of the chickens. It is better to feed the coarse-grained powder with better quality than the pellet feed which is easier to break into fine powder. The uniformity of the feed pellets is also important for the production performance of the flock. Feeding on a diet of uniform-grained diets also produced better performance, increased feed intake, and a faster growth rate. It is easier for chickens to feed on even-sized feed and reduce picky eaters. The evenness of the particles is also good for the quality of the pellet feed. If the pellets in the pellets are all of the same size, the chance of breakage of the pellets is relatively small.
Feed grain size has a great influence on the production performance of commercial broiler chickens; too fine feed pellets will reduce feed intake and growth rate. However, too thick feed pellets can also have a negative effect on the performance of commercial broilers. What kind of pellet feed can make the best performance of the chickens?
In fact, the existing data is still not enough to answer this question. The data provided by Nir et al. (1994) suggest that the optimal particle size for the brooding material is 0.7-0.9 mm with the powder. In the case of pelleted feeds, Aviagen recommends that birds aged 0-10 days should be fed sieve-filtered granules, and pellets with a diameter of 2-3 mm should be fed from 11-28 days of age, on the 29th. Age-to-date feeding of pelleted pellets with a particle diameter of 3 mm. There is currently no data on the optimal particle size for the raw materials used to make the pellets. This depends on different raw materials and feed mill equipment and feed processing factors. The general principle is that the raw material pellets for making the pellets should be fine enough to ensure the quality of the pellets without affecting the production performance of the flocks. In order to achieve this balance, the quality of the pellets should be monitored periodically in relation to the production performance of the flocks.
Conclusion The ideal feed intake is the basis for the effective use of feed by the flock and better growth rates. The pellet quality/feed shape has a very important influence on feed intake and growth rate; poor pellet quality results in reduced feed intake for chickens. Understanding the error between the nutrient content of the feed (as determined by dieticians) and the actual chicken intake is very important, and the gap between the two should be reduced as much as possible. Improving the quality of pellet feed has a very important role to play in the production performance of chickens.
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