Program 5: Litter management

Program Overview

Why is the Program work important? How does it contribute to the bigger picture?

Litter management is a risk-management process. Water is essential for nutrition (it is the chicken’s greatest nutrient input) and cooling. Similarly, microbiome in chicken sheds is not only unavoidable, but is essential for digestion (i.e. ‘healthy gut’). It is important to manage and minimise potential risks that can arise with them associated with having too much or too little water, or a microbiome imbalance or presence of excess pathogens.

Overwhelming evidence in research publications and from industry experience demonstrate a direct and proportional relationship between litter moisture content and increased risks in relation to litter microbiome, pathogens, ammonia exposure and animal welfare outcomes

Program aim

To reduce the amount of water in the litter by reducing the amount of water being added to the litter through targeted and improved nutrition strategies, and developing strategies to increase water evaporation from litter (while considering normal production constraints and conditions). A further aim is to improve monitoring of the chicken environment in a R&D setting to quantify the commercial value of additional environmental monitoring.

Program focus

The Environment program will:

Assess all nutrition and gut health strategies and additives in Program 1-4 in terms of their contribution to reducing the amount of water excreted to the litter.
Optimise water evaporation from litter and prevent the occurrence of litter with high moisture content.
Assist the nutrition, gut health and microbiology programs to source re-used litter and ammonia-control amendments from lab-based trials.
Evaluate a modified layout of air circulation system from available research in commercial meat chicken sheds to optimise the application and match the Australian chicken meat houses with ceiling obstructions.