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Like other businesses, poultry production faces challenges, including cash flow, inflation, economic downturns, and market volatility. Despite all those constant challenges and variations, poultry businesses remain profitable. However, it is always necessary to adopt methodologies to optimize productivity and profitability.
Common advice to maximize productivity, profitability, and economic sustainability is to improve efficiency, reduce waste, manage costs, review pricing, and improve infrastructure in the long term.
Improving environmental sustainability is also related to reducing waste, emissions, and energy use.
Feed is the most important factor affecting production costs and sustainability structures worldwide.
The most effective method to reduce feed costs is through feed formulation.
Least-cost feed formulation based on linear programming reduces costs but does not consider maximizing business profitability.
ISSUES WITH LEAST-COST FEED FORMULATION
Least-cost feed formulation has also consolidated the idea that nutrient levels are fixed, obtained from Tables or Breeder Guides, making them an absolute requirement.
Those “nutrient requirements” for poultry are values determined for maximum biological performance in multiple independent experiments. This means that a maximum of three nutrients have been determined under similar conditions.
Still, profit-maximizing energy and nutrient levels are only known once an econometric analysis is made for each market and production site.
The most profitable nutrient levels could be variable, depending on changes in feedstuff cost and price of the poultry products to sell (live birds, carcasses, cut-up parts, eggs in shell or egg mass).
A common issue with least-cost feed formulation is that when the prices of protein sources like soybean meal rise, the mathematical solution tends to reduce dietary amino acid density to obtain cheaper feed.
However, broilers are sensitive to amino acid intake.
At lower amino acid levels, they may dictate a lower growth rate, yield, higher feed conversion ratio, and lower income, reducing profitability.
On the other hand, profitability may be reduced if the same dietary nutrient density is maintained when the poultry final product price reduces. Bird stocking density and final market weight can also affect the optimum dietary nutrient densities to...
