Modeling egg production as a means of optimizing dietary nutrient contents for laying hens.

Abstract

Poultry geneticists have been highly successful in improving the egg output and feed efficiency of laying hens and, to a lesser extent, broiler breeders. As the potential output of these birds has changed so have their nutrient requirements and these are reflected in user manual guidelines, tables of requirements, and company know-how. However, the basis of these suggested changes is unlikely to be based on theoretical calculations of the updated requirements of the bird due to the lack of a robust theory describing the manner in which the nutrient requirements are calculated. Such a theory has been developed recently and is described in this article. To calculate the amino acid and energy requirements of an individual laying hen, it is necessary to be able to predict its potential body protein weight at the start of lay and its potential egg output and egg weight over time (Emmans and Fisher, 1986). From this information, and the nutritional constants that describe the rates of conversion of feed nutrients to maintenance and egg nutrients, it is possible to calculate the daily requirement of each of the amino acids and energy throughout the laying period. Once the requirements for an individual hen are correctly calculated, the same process can be followed for each bird in a simulated flock, the parameters for each bird being defined using the means and standard deviations of each parameter describing the mean individual. Calculating the daily nutrient intake required to meet the potential performance of each individual in terms of numbers of eggs produced over the production cycle would improve the possibility of optimizing the composition (and daily allocation, in the case of broiler breeders) of the feed offered to the flock. To achieve these goals, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing the attainment of sexual maturity in these birds, of the ovulatory cycle and how this changes during the laying cycle, and of the changes that occur in egg and body component weights over time is required. This article describes such a stochastic egg production model developed at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Brazil. In this article, only the calculation of the nutrient requirements of flocks of laying hens and broiler breeders is described, with examples of these requirements for simulated populations having different potential outputs. No attempt has been made to use this information to predict food intake or the consequences on performance of situations where hens were unable to consume sufficient feed. The model was developed based on studies conducted at the Poultry Science Laboratory, UNESP, Brazil. One study was conducted with two strains of laying hens (Hy-Line W-36 and Isa brown) (Bendezu et al., 2018) and another with broiler breeders (Cobb) (Ferreira et al., 2016) to generate the equations and parameters used in the models described herein. An overall scheme of the egg production model is presented in Figure 1. Open in a separate window Figure 1. Flow diagram from the dynamic simulation model to estimate the nutritional requirements as a function of body protein weight and egg production.