Page 9 - National Poultry Newspaper

UNE poultry nutritionist Dr Natalie Morgan.
Seeking a revolution in chicken gut health
This can mean walking through the flock up to three times a day moni- toring for signs of poor health.
“This information could then be provided to pro- cessors to assist in fore- casting,” Mr Hebblewhite said.
“A lot more processing ability and detailed infor- mation can be extracted from the same type of camera hardware, it would just need to be validated in additional trials.”
CAN a waste product deliver important im- provements to chicken production?
Dr Morgan observes that egg-laying hens live longer than meat chickens, so establish more mature gut micro- biomes, suggesting the positive effects of XOS might be amplified.
on the chickens to make them in their gut?"
However, a Queensland research team has recently developed a more accurate and efficient system than visual checks, which is al- most as simple as mount- ing a camera on the poul- try shed wall.
This innovative software can recognise and differ- entiate chickens from the background of the shed or enclosure and converts the pixels to physical distanc- es, which means the tech- nology can also be used for predicting physical sizes and bird weights.
Dr McCarthy has al- ready considered the type of commercial partners to take the technology to market, and said a big at- traction is its potential for use in industries other than poultry.
What if antibiotic use in poultry production could be significantly lowered by using waste products from milling?
The grains fed to commercial poultry contain long-chain sug- ars that reduce nutrient absorption in the bird’s gut, meaning these ex- pensive and important nutrients are wasted, or act as a food source for pathogenic gut bac- teria.
Because XOS can be extracted from waste products derived when grains are milled for starch, it is a potentially cheap way to obtain gains in poultry pro- duction – an industry where most other av- enues for production gains are pushed to their limits.
Funded by the University of Southern Queensland and AgriFutures Aus- tralia’s Chicken Meat Pro- gram, mechatronic engi- neers Dr Cheryl McCarthy and Dr Derek Long have linked continual on-board image analysis – similar to facial recognition – with a low-cost camera to provide regular updates on flock movement throughout the day.
“A technology provider working in poultry or agri- culture with sensing equip- ment or cameras in their product range could port the developed video analy- sis software onto their pre- ferred camera hardware and develop a graphical user interface to present video analysis results to
In the push for a competi- tive advantage in animal welfare, fast food chain McDonald’s is actively re- searching camera technol- ogies in the US and Europe to monitor broiler flocks, using different approaches to the USQ technology. Judy Kennedy
Dr Natalie Morgan is investigating these possibilities after win- ning the Australian Eggs Award in the 2021 Science and Innova- tion Awards for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
Dr Morgan's hope is that her pilot project will show the potential for supplementing feeds with XOS to boost hen feed conversion and productivity, and lower faeces contamination of eggs – and possibly even improve gut health to the point where it affects the chickens' immunity to disease, lessening dependence on antibiotics.
“We’d anticipate a farmer would have a low-cost col- our camera in their shed recording video clips and the software algorithms will analyse the images and turn them into data reflecting bird behaviour patterns and provide that to the farmer,” Dr McCa- rthy said.
This article was first pub- lished on growag.com.au
A poultry nutrition- ist at UNE, Dr Morgan is using her $22,000 award to fund an eight- week project to exam- ine the effects of adding prebiotics called xylo- oligosaccharides to the diets of egg-laying hens.
To deal with the prob- lem, all commercial chicken feed contains an enzyme that breaks up the long-chain sug- ars into more desirable forms – including XOS.
The ground-breaking system is an Australian first, and after two years of testing USQ and Agri- Futures Australia are seek- ing interest from commer- cial partners to complete an extended range of trials in large commercial sheds and manufacture a shelf- ready product.
Each camera can ‘see’ around 1000 chickens per day and its findings can then be extrapolated across a flock of 40,000 to 50,000.
Cameras offer new vision for chicken welfare
AGRIFUTURES Aus- tralia and the University of Southern Queensland are seeking technology partners to commercial- ise novel video analysis software to better detect growth and welfare indi- cators of poultry flocks and enhance on-farm de- cision making.
terns of the chickens, pick- ing up changes that could be indicative of underlying health issues,” Dr McCa- rthy said.
for the supply chain.” “There is currently no system evaluated in Aus- tralia for chicken shed
the farmer,” Dr McCarthy said.
Poultry farmers spend a great deal of time check- ing the health and welfare of their chickens.
Existing camera tech- niques used for monitoring flocks analyse the num- ber of pixels in the image rather than analysing in- dividual animals, making it difficult to correlate ac- curately with bird activity.
“Growers will also be able to estimate the weight of their chickens through- out the shed and identify if they are on target or not.
“A commercial partner with interests in livestock could use the same hard- ware and adapt the algo- rithms to detect attributes like beef cattle weights and condition scores.
“The algorithms in the camera technology recog- nise subtle changes in pat- terns of behaviour and the information is provided to the farmer throughout the day as a brief report.”
monitoring.
“Practically on farm,
“This has been tested on broiler chickens, but the image analysis software could be re-parameterised or re-trained for layer flocks, to account for dif- ferences in the physical na- ture of layer versus broiler strains.
this technology will allow growers to monitor flocks around the clock.
XOS have been stud- ied in meat chickens, where they significantly improved gut health and production, but have yet to be investigated in egg-laying chickens.
As a prebiotic, XOS fuel beneficial gut bac- teria.
Former AgriFutures chicken meat advisory panel chair and grower Guy Hebblewhite said, “The technology is a game changer for im- proving welfare, produc- tivity and forecasting
Dr Morgan's question is, "So what happens if we add prebiotic XOS directly into the feed, as opposed to relying
If even one of these results emerges from the pilot, Dr Morgan's work with XOS may extend considerably.
Dr Cheryl McCarthy was part of the research team that developed the novel video analysis software to better detect growth and welfare indicators of poultry flocks and enhance on-farm decision making.
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ELDERS Real Estate Rockhampton has been instructed by the Smalls Trading Co to o er the poultry egg farm Country Fresh Eggs, located near Rockhampton, for sale by private treaty.
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“The cameras observe the daily behavioural pat-
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National Poultry Newspaper, September 2021 – Page 9