Research/Role of voluntary litter consumption by broiler chickens on gut function and gut health
From Poultry Hub
Project Title: Role of voluntary litter consumption by broiler chickens on gut function and gut health
Project Leader: Harald Hetland at NULS and Mikkelsen at UNE funded by Poultry CRC (Project 06-18)
Duration of Project: 1 July 2006 to 30 June 2009
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Project overview
The global trend of a move away from in-feed antibiotics and coccidiostats is forcing feed and livestock industries worldwide to explore and develop alternative, sustainable systems without using such additives. This project is a follow up of a previous Poultry CRC project which demonstrated that access to litter (bedding) materials enhances gut development, which, in turn, affects the health and performance of the birds.
Experiments in both Norway and Australia are investigating the consumption of different types of litter by broiler chickens and turkeys on feed intake and growth performance, gizzard function and gut development, nutrient digestibility and gut microflora. Hopefully, the knowledge gained will be useful for optimising housing conditions and feed composition in the poultry industries in both Norway and Australia, helping them move towards a more sustainable production of poultry meat with minimal changes to current production practices.
Project objectives
- Investigate the consumption of different types of litter by broiler chickens and turkeys on feed intake and growth performance, gizzard function and gut development, nutrient digestibility and gut microflora.
Project progress
A final experiment conducted in Norway to investigate how litter type and dietary fibre content affect gizzard lesions in broiler chickens demonstrated that a low-fibre diet causes higher level of gizzard lesions compared to a high fibre diet. This illustrates that gizzard activity is related to gizzard lesions. However, this phenomenon had no clear correlation to litter access, probably because of relative low voluntary litter consumption.
Experiments conducted in Australia have demonstrated that graded levels (0-12%) of force-fed litter incorporated in the feed does not impair growth performance but stimulates gut development, nutrient digestibility and composition of the gut microflora of broiler chickens. Analysis using a bacterial profiling technique (T-RFLP) has further revealed that ileal and caecal microbial communities were significantly different for birds on the diet containing 12% hardwood sawdust as compared with the control diet. The experiment investigating the effect of litter in combination with different fibre content in the feed on growth performance and other physiological and microbiological parameters has demonstrated an interaction between litter type and dietary fibre content. Birds on the high-fibre/paper litter and low-fibre/hard-wood litter combinations showed significantly better feed conversion ratios than birds fed the high- and low-fibre diets in combination with hard-wood and paper litter, respectively. This confirms previous findings and indicates that the level of ingested coarse materials by broiler chickens determines the physiological and nutritional effects and thereby the beneficial effects on performance. A final experiment in Australia will investigate the same combinations of litter type and dietary fibre content in birds challenged with necrotic enteritis.
