Poultry diets are composed primarily of a mixture of several feedstuffs such as cereal grains, soybean meal, animal by-product meals, fats, and vitamin and mineral premixes. These feedstuffs, together with water, provide the energy and nutrients that are essential for the bird's growth, reproduction, and health, namely proteins and amino acids, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and vitamins. The energy necessary for maintaining the bird's general metabolism and for producing meat and eggs is provided by the energy-yielding dietary components, primarily carbohydrates and fats, but also protein.
Feed ingredients for poultry diets are selected for the nutrients they can provide, the absence of anti-nutritional or toxic factors, their palatability or effect on voluntary feed intake, and their cost. The key nutrients that need to be supplied by the dietary ingredients are amino acids contained in proteins, vitamins and minerals. All life functions also require energy, obtained from starches, lipids and proteins.
Feed ingredients are broadly classified into cereal grains, protein meals, fats and oils, minerals, feed additives, and miscellaneous raw materials, such as roots and tubers. These will be discussed in separate headings below. More information on measuring the nutrient composition of ingredients and the process of formulating poultry feeds is available in the section on feed formulation.
Cereal Grains: The quality of cereal grains will also depend on seasonal and storage conditions. Poor growing or storage conditions can lead to grains with a lower than expected energy content or contamination with mycotoxins or toxin-producing organisms such as fungi and ergots. Genetic and environmental factors also affect not only the content of nutrients in grains but also the nutritive value, which takes into account the digestibility of nutrients contained in an ingredient in the target animal.
Energy: Energy is not a nutrient but a property of energy-yielding nutrients when they are oxidized during metabolism. The energy value of a feed ingredient or of a diet can be expressed in several ways. Thus, a description is presented below of terminology associated with dietary energy values, including units of measure (digestible energy, metabolizable energy, etc.). Because metabolizable energy values are most commonly used to define the dietary energy available to poultry, several procedures for determining metabolizable energy values, by using bioassays or estimates based on proximate analysis, are described. An example of the disposition of dietary energy ingested by a laying hen and some general considerations regarding setting dietary energy concentrations of diets follow.
Protein meals: Protein is provided from both vegetable and animal sources, such as oilseed meals, legumes and abattoir and fish processing by-products. Vegetable protein sources usually come as meal or cake, the by-product of oilseed crops. The main oilseed crops include soybean, rapeseed/canola, sunflower, palm kernel, copra, linseed peanut and sesame seed. After the oil is extracted, the remaining residue is used as feed ingredient. Oilseed meals make up 20-30% of a poultry diet. Inclusion levels do vary among formulations for different species and for the same species in different regions. The main vegetable protein sources used in Australian poultry diets are soybean and canola. Other sources like cottonseed, sunflower, peas and lupines may be included in poultry feed formulations if these are available at a reasonable price. Many oilseeds and legumes contain anti-nutritive factors. Some of these anti-nutritive factors can be destroyed by heat and are used in heat-treated meals. New cultivars of some oilseeds and legumes have been developed that are naturally low in anti-nutritive factors (ANF), permitting higher levels of the unprocessed grains to be included in poultry diets without ill-effect.
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