Each year, tens, or possibly hundreds, of new nutrition and health products and product versions are launched into the poultry industry. Many target productivity improvements as a primary benefit with additional benefits for health, management or sustainability.
To what extent are products in the same category different from each other? Do they really work? How much value do they bring? These are questions that nutritionists, veterinarians and production managers ask every day, especially when margins become tighter.
It is no surprise that measuring the effectiveness of solutions in real production is not an easy task. There are numerous factors adding variability to production results, and quantifying the effect of a small change in the system feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The traditional way of testing additives, ingredients and nutrition or health programs has been by designing animal performance trials. You introduce a product and test it versus a control with everything else equal. Simple, right?
Overcoming the flaws of small-scale testing
Even though small-scale performance trials can be very useful to test specific hypotheses, the reality is that they have some important flaws. The conclusions are applicable to the specific conditions of the trial, and there can be bias from the person or company who is designing the trial and presenting the results.
One way to improve the usefulness of trials to producers is by increasing the level of transparency. Some feed additives companies have taken proactive steps in the last decade to publish all trials for a product in meta-analyses, which greatly increases credibility – an example of good practice.
The European Food Safety Authority has also taken steps towards increasing the transparency of animal trials for product registration, with the requirement of disclosing every trial for testing the efficacy of a product. The principle is good, but it can bring complexity and cost.
Lastly, some suppliers have put great effort into testing products locally, for each country, diet and production system. That practice provides more relevant data points about local conditions, but it does not completely remove the biases and limitations of small-scale trials.
The new testing paradigm
Given these difficulties, what might be the solution?
The value of small-scale experiments is greatest in the early stages of product development, up to the point where we know that a product does what it is supposed to do, and that it is safe for animals, humans and the environment.
The gold standard for testing after that point should be, whenever possible, large-scale commercial testing. The problem is that it is very easy to conduct bad large-scale commercial testing.
Leading poultry companies, however, have developed highly sophisticated field-testing schemes in recent years, using advanced, constantly improving methods and bio-economic models to test new products. That will be the trend to follow.
There is an additional element, which is a boom in precision farming technologies. If you can measure weight gains, temperatures, feed intakes and nutrients in real-time from entire production systems, achieving real proof-of-value becomes feasible and a competitive advantage.
It will not stop there. Next generation diagnostics technologies will additionally help us to understand what is happening inside animals in the field. All the information that is needed to test the value and effectiveness of products in the field accurately could be within reach.
At that point, only solutions that add value in a particular system at a particular time will secure their place. Life could actually be simpler for producers. That is what we mean by precision nutrition and health.
Building anti–fragility into poultry production
