Abstract
Simple SummaryThe inclusion of agricultural co-products has been increased to utilize the nutrients in these products available at low cost, but inherently, it adds a high dietary fiber content in the poultry diets. The use of exogenous feed enzymes along with advancements in feed milling, feed formulation, and processing of these non-conventional ingredients to improve their digestibility and utilization have played an emphatic role in boosting their use globally. Despite such developments, the presence of a high level of dietary fibers (DF) acting in an anti-nutritive manner still poses challenges in poultry feeding. Various isolated forms of fiber or feed enzymes to break DF into fermentable substrates are being used extensively to provide potential prebiotics to support beneficial gut microbiota or probiotics to improve the gut health of poultry raised without antibiotic growth promoters (AGP). This review reports and discusses the existing challenges in feeding high-DF feed ingredients to poultry and the opportunities that are available to improve the nutritive value of such non-conventional feed ingredients by adopting various technologies.Many fibrous ingredients incorporated in poultry feed to reduce production costs have low digestibility and cause poor growth in poultry. However, all plant-based fibers are not equal, and thus exert variable physiological effects on the birds, including but not limited to, digestibility, growth performance, and microbial fermentation. Several types of fibers, especially oligosaccharides, when supplemented in poultry diets in isolated form, exhibit prebiotic effects by enhancing beneficial gut microbiota, modulating gut immunity, boosting intestinal mucosal health, and increasing the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) in the gut. Recently, poultry producers are also facing the challenge of limiting the use of antibiotic growth promoters (AGP) in poultry feed. In addition to other alternatives in use, exogenous non-starch polysaccharides digesting enzymes (NSPase) and prebiotics are being used to provide substrates to support the gut microbiome. We also conducted a meta-analysis of different studies conducted in similar experimental conditions to evaluate the variability and conclusiveness in effects of NSPase on growth performance of broilers fed fibrous ingredients. This review presents a holistic approach in discussing the existing challenges of incorporating high-fiber ingredients in poultry feed, as well as strategies to fully utilize the potential of such ingredients in improving feed efficiency and gut health of poultry.
Highlights
Animals 2021, 11, 181 starch is a homopolysaccharide of glucose that is resistant to digestion by endogenous enzymes and is categorized into various types based on its physical inaccessibility, granular form, retrogradation, and chemical modification
In broilers fed the diet supplemented with 16,000 birchwood xylan unit (BXU)/kg of xylanase enzyme for 42 days, Lee et al [74] observed that the enzyme increased the cecal acetate, propionate, and butyrate by more than 20%, 30%, and 40% respectively, while it decreased the production of branched-chain short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) by a small amount
We summarized the effect of non-starch polysaccharides digesting enzymes (NSPase) enzymes on average daily gain (ADG) and feed conversion ratio (FCR) of commercial broilers fed wheat, rye, and barley-based fibrous diet
Summary
Alternative feedstuffs such as agricultural co-products, including wheat middlings, soy hulls, oil cakes, distillers dried grains and solubles (DDGS), and sugar beet pulp, etc., are regularly incorporated in poultry feed. Because of their low digestibility, NSP reduces the apparent metabolizable energy (AME) value of feed, and increases the viscosity of digesta, which adversely affects the digestibility of other nutrients [5]. Preprocessing and enzyme supplementation to increase the digestibility of fiber will improve utilization of other nutrients in feed and will increase fermentable resources for the gut microbes [5,9,10]. The fermentable substrate can range from complex fragments to simple oligomers that could serve as prebiotics if they could selectively enhance the population of beneficial bacteria leading to immunomodulation and improved gut health [11,12,13]
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