Nano-bubbles, bio-char and bird flu dominate poultry research seminar

Richard Pearson of Oxcel spoke about the company’s bolt-on, scalable, medical-grade system, which generates oxygenated nano-bubbles in a farm’s water supply before filtering out metals and contaminants.

Increasing dissolved oxygen by 400%

Farmers who have adopted the technology report that it improves the birds’ gut microbiomes, facilitates better nutrient uptake, improves the feed conversion ratio and even keeps the pipes clear. This reduces biofilm in the system, limiting surfaces on which bacteria can thrive. It also results in drier litter and consequently less hock burn.

Oxcel has run academic trials with the Scottish Rural College (SRUC) on 12 sets of 20 Ross 308 broilers testing their product against tap water. They have included stress tests with coccidiosis but are struggling to get like-for-like testing on broiler farms due to differing parent flock ages.

Pearson said the Oxcel system increases the dissolved oxygen in the water supply by 400%.

Measuring the movement of flocks

The seminar heard from Professor Marian Dawkins, a professor of animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, who talked about measuring the welfare of birds, saying most systems are based around post-mortem and measure things such as mortality, hock burn and pododermatitis.

She spoke about the OpticFlock, a 24/7 CCTV system that gives continuous monitoring of living birds, and uses Raspberry Pi-based hardware to plot graphs and data to send to farm staff.

It has been tested on 500 commercial broiler farms in the UK, US, Switzerland and Hungary and measures the movement of whole flocks. OpticFlock has found that unhealthy flocks move differently to healthy ones and have higher levels of mortality and hock burn.

Each day, the system produces a traffic light welfare indicator for that flock. Researchers have found that the technology can detect issues in chicks as young as 4 days old. Campylobacter can only be detected from cultured faecal samples at 21 days, but Dawkins says that OpticFlock can detect positive flocks from 7 days.

Dawkins says that smart tech must improve welfare and efficiency and has to make sense financially before farmers will adopt it. She says the OpticFlock system can be used in conjunction with others. “We are working with one company that is using water to decide when to administer vaccines. It can be combined with other data to give better predictions of flock health and progress – we do need collaboration between academia and real farming,” she added.

Biochar research and sustainability goals

Professor Colin Snape and associate professor Helen West of the University of Nottingham talked about biochar – a stable, carbon-rich material produced from heating biomass in the absence of oxygen. It is a way of sequestering carbon, and 2 million tonnes of biochar would meet 10% of the UK’s greenhouse gas target.

Biochar can be used to remove carbon from the environment and can then be added to soils to improve their water-retaining capacity. It can also be used in the production of syngas and bio-oil for energy generation.

West concluded that adding wood-based biochar to poultry litter absorbs nitrogen during composting and prevents it from leaching from the pile. Potassium is released more slowly, while composting itself did not reduce antimicrobial resistance.

When asked during a panel Q&A session what the challenges were to farmers taking up new technology, Dawkins said that more farm trials were needed to demonstrate a good return on investment. Pearson said that his company had better results with smaller farms where the farmer had the power to green-light projects.

Computer modelling approach to avian influenza

The second session saw Professor Mike Tildesley of the University of Warwick present the computer modelling his team had been using to monitor the impact of control measures on the transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza in poultry, based on the 2022/23 outbreak.

Some of the work around vaccines has been overtaken by events since the UK started its avian influenza vaccine trial in turkeys. However, the study showed that vaccinating in areas with a high density of infected premises would be most effective.

“We can determine optimal vaccination radius for a given number of doses. If we vaccinate 200,000 birds per day and vaccinate at 5km around all infected premises, we can reduce total number of infected farms by 34.5%,” said Tildesley.

He concluded by saying that researchers would like to investigate whether shared ownership of poultry farms increases transmission risk.

Poultry production and public perception

Dr Siobhan Abeyesinghe of the Royal Veterinary College looked at public perceptions on chicken production and bird welfare. Organisers undertook focus groups and questionnaires of a (mostly) urban audience which was polled as a way of clarifying public perceptions of the industry as some retailers started to transition to slow-growing birds.

The survey showed some worrying misconceptions. For instance, 68% of people believed that broilers also produced eggs for human consumption and are reared in cages (61%), and use antibiotics (48%) and growth hormones (48%).

There was also confusion and mistrust over welfare labelling and a general feeling that shoppers will spend money on luxury products that are cheap to manufacture but will not spend extra on meat.

Controlling red mites

Dan Price of Moredun Research Institute updated delegates on the development of control methods for red mites.

The ectoparasite has a rapid life cycle going from egg to larva in 7 days and in 3 of those life stages they take a blood meal from the birds, which can cause huge blood loss and costs the layer sector more than £230 million each year.

Researchers think that mites may become resistant to existing treatments, so they are looking for an Achilles heel in the mite’s genome to develop a vaccine.

Transmission and risk of bird flu

The final session on avian influenza included a presentation by Professor Ian Brown of The Pirbright Institute, who condensed a 2-day seminar on the HPAIV FluTrailMap project, which looked at the transmission and risk of avian influenza, into a 45-minute keynote address.

“The virus is not standing still – it is constantly changing, which is something we are going to have to consider for vaccination in the future,” said Brown, adding that the cost benefit on vaccination is not clear now as it is cost prohibitive. Many places are using vaccine strains that are 20 years out of date.

He said that the study looked at airborne transmission because it is a concern often raised by farmers. They sampled the air around poultry sheds at the time of depopulation and found the virus can only travel limited distances.

He noted that the transformation of the high-pathogenicity virus from N8 to N1 had added vigour to the virus and the total financial impact of avian influenza was £90.54 million in 2021; £227.64 million in 2022 and £6.69 million in 2023. This includes a lot of processes and costs that tend to be ignored.

Biosecurity fatigue and encouraging consistent compliance is one of the main challenges facing the sector. He concluded by saying that more research on wild birds and ventilation was needed.