Raising healthy broilers when antibiotic free

Feed is an important source of animal nutrition, and the basis for promoting animal growth. Feed ingredients, as an important component of diet play a decisive role in the improvement of animal nutrition, especially some high quality functional feed ingredients. Such feed ingredients should improve gut health, enhance immunity and promote growth.

Improve gut health

The animal gut will be the first to be challenged after removing antibiotics from the feed formula, causing both growth performance and profit decreases. Therefore, the antibiotic free diet for poultry needs to ensure intestinal development and function first.

The villus height, crypt depth and villus height/crypt depth (V/C value) are important indexes to measure the digestion and absorption function of the small intestine. The results in Table 1 indicated that GroPro Poultry improved villus height of duodenum, jejunum and ileum significantly, which showed the nucleotide in GroPro Poultry promoted differentiation and proliferation of intestinal villus epithelial cells.

Some of the tissue such as small intestine is in vigorous metabolism which makes de novo synthesis of nucleotides being limited, especially when the animal goes through stress, intestinal damage and rapid growth in the young stage. In this moment, the animal needs supplements of exogenous nucleotide, and nucleotide from yeast is meeting the demand of nucleotide in fast growing broilers.

Enhance immunity

Under high density and large-scale breeding conditions, the broilers were in poor health, which causes broiler farmers to rely more on antibiotics. If antibiotic usage stops, it will cause an increase in animal diseases. On the other hand, if antibiotics are continued to be used, it will also lead to a decline in the immune function and increased diseases in broilers. Therefore, we need to set our hands to nutrition, enhance immunity and management, in order to ensure the broiler’s normal immune function, and then antibiotic free farming can be achieved.

The main immune organs of poultry are thymus, spleen and bursa of Fabricius. The development status of these organs affects immune response and resistance to invasion of foreign pathogenic bacteria, which reflects the functional status of immune cells and the immune level of the organism indirectly. The results in Table 2 indicated that the addition of GroPro Poultry improved thymus index in broiler significantly, and improved the bursal index to a certain extent. This indicated that the product could promote the development of immune organs in broilers.

Use quality ingredients

The balance of nutrition, the use of feed ingredients with high digestibility and the elimination of anti-nutritional factors are the basis for the healthy growth of broilers. Only by ensuring the quality of the nutrient supply, can the broiler’s immune organs develop normal immune function. Moreover, broilers will be able to adapt to the stress period and achieve rapid growth and development.

GroPro Poultry is a high quality and functional feed ingredient including all nutrients derived from yeast. It can not only provide better nutrition for broilers, but also exogenous nucleotides. The results in Table 3 showed that the product increased final weight and feed conversion efficiency.

The product is a new option to help broiler diets be antibiotic free. It has not only high protein digestibility, but also the function of repairing intestinal mucosa and enhancing immunity. In addition, combined with other animal protein raw materials, it can reduce the cost of feed formulation.

Author: Xiao Xiangqian, Product Manager and Chen Zhongping, Technical Manager, Angel Animal Nutrition, China