MANAGEMENT ▶▶▶
Evaluating performance through whole-house trials
Well-planned, carefully designed whole-house broiler trials offer customers significant benefits through comparative testing of breeds, nutrition, environmental factors or management procedures. Along with providing valuable product performance information, trials allow customers to make important economic decisions which may impact the company.
T BY AVIAGEN
rial protocols must be designed with clear objec- tives, a focus on minimising variation between the treatments and detail-oriented management. Fail- ure to properly plan a trial, or strictly follow the in-
structions outlined in the protocol, can result in incorrect data, poor breed comparisons and possible economic losses. Once a clear objective for the trial has been determined, it is essential to have a control treatment (a standard group with no changes made) to compare to the treatment group(s). It is recommended to only change the attribute you are interest- ed in investigating in your treatments, and to use paired house testing. The more paired houses used, the smaller the difference between treatment and control that can be distin- guished. In order for results to be consistent, it is strongly rec- ommended to run multiple trials (at least 5 trials in a series) testing the same parameters, before final conclusions are made. When running paired house trials, multiple paired placements can be made over time, removing any farm bias. Also, the houses used should be side by side on the same farm and have similar house design, equipment, manage- ment programme and stocking density. To design a successful broiler trial, the following points should be considered: • Communication between all personnel involved to ensure the objective and procedures are clearly understood.
• Use blind testing to remove breed or nutrition bias ( depending on the subject of testing).
• Have recorded measurements of live weight and mortality 28 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 4, 2019
at selected intervals during grow-out. Record feed delivery, body weight and mortality on each house separately so that feed conversion and liveability can be calculated by breed or treatment. Avoid using houses that share feed bins with other houses; these houses cannot be used for FCR calculation.
• Avoid using broiler flocks with multiple breeder sources and confirm the source flock age of each breed cross is not more than 2 weeks apart in age.
• Maintain breed cross integrity by ensuring that parent fe- males are the same breed cross and no male replacement has occurred using a different strain of male. If there are any questions about flock integrity, the trial should not proceed.
• Control factors such as hatching and housing conditions, farm management, nutrition and withdrawal time.
• Ensure that seasonal impacts will not influence the result, e.g., by spreading the trials over seasons.
• Use houses that best represent the normal commercial programme in terms of equipment.
PHOTO: TIM SCRIVENER
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