News

Healthy Flock? Go with your gut

Growing international concern over antimicrobial resistance is forcing poultry producers across the world to look at new ways of maintaining production levels and keeping birds healthy. Glenneis Kriel heard from two feed and nutrition experts about the importance of good gut health. Antimicrobial growth promoters have been used for more than 60 years to boost animal growth and feed efficiency in many countries. It is thought that most of these benefits come from suppression of the population of microbes in [...]

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Free Range Labelling Under Threat Due to Bird Flu – Europe

Poultry in Europe have been forced indoors to protect them from a dangerous type of avian influenza. However EU rules mean that if the birds are ordered indoors for more than twelve weeks their products can no longer be listed as free range. European countries are facing the real and potential loss of free range status, the National Farmers Union’s Chief Poultry advisor Gary Ford wrote: “The impact that this will have on the British free range poultry industry has [...]

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Biosecurity App

FarmBiosecurity is a free app that enables you to create a biosecurity plan. The app is an effective tool using six biosecurity essentials with an Action Planner. Simply select the actions that apply to you or type in your own actions. Your selections then become a to-do list that you can share with others or email to yourself and print out. The app is a free, portable biosecurity plan ready to view, even without internet access. Attach photos as reminders for later [...]

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Free Range Egg Labelling – Have your say

On 31 March 2016, Consumer Affairs Ministers agreed to the introduction of an information standard requiring eggs labelled as ‘free range’ to have been laid by hens that had meaningful and regular access to an outdoor range, and were subject to an outdoor stocking density of 10,000 hens per hectare or less. The information standard will require producers to prominently disclose the outdoor stocking density of hens laying free range eggs on their packaging allowing consumers to easily compare different [...]

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Plucky ideas for feathers

The extraction of keratin protein from chicken feathers poses an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way to rid the poultry industry of waste. Glenneis Kriel reports. Poultry consumption generates more than five million tons of feathers a year. Demand for this by-product is unfortunately low, with most of it ending up being burned, buried or ground up as feed for livestock. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, along with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is however researching [...]

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