Do you know what the chicken you ate last night had for supper? Rob Gouws and his team at the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg do. Their interest in the poultry industry has led to the development of several simulation models that predict, for one, what your peri-peri chicken, so delicately prepared on the coals, would have had for his last supper.
The poultry industry is already the largest agricultural industry in South Africa. It provides direct employment for 30 000 people, and a further 100 000 jobs are created through fringe industries.
The industry is growing every day, as health conscious consumers opt for healthier white meat instead of red meat and as the demand for healthy, well-bred chickens that deliver quality meat increases.
Gouws says the booming business prompted researchers to develop scientific ways of improving the industry.
‘The burgeoning local consumer market means the potential for further increases is enormous, and yet the poultry industry suffers from a lack of scientific basis on which important decisions are made,” he said.
His vision, and that of his team, to develop simulation models that can be used to predict accurately and adapt certain growth, feeding and breeding patterns in the chickens, has earned the project a Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme nomination. The research offers a strong scientific foundation for the long-term growth of the poultry industry in South Africa.
‘This project is aimed at forging closer cooperation between this university department and the poultry industry, such that the outcome will be of benefit to the industry,” he said.
The broiler industry, which specialises in breeding young chickens for braaiing and other similar methods, generates more than 12% of the total agricultural sector income. The team’s broiler growth model has already won international acclaim, and is used by organisations around the world. The model is the one in the world that predicts the voluntary food intake of chickens.
It has given broiler producers an effective way to determine the best feeding strategies, or feeding programmes that ensure that they are making more money.
Gouws says an accurate estimate of daily consumption makes it possible to predict the growth of the chickens’ thighs, wings, drums, breasts and bodies as a whole.
‘This makes it possible to create a feeding strategy aimed at increasing the growth of the most favoured body parts.”
The team developed an optimisation programme, incorporating the growth model. Gouws says the new programme will revolutionise the way in which feeding decisions are made in the future.
The team began investigating and developing the simulation models about six years ago.
Gouws worked for a feed company for three years as a technical adviser, getting to know the poultry industry and the problems it faces.
When he started his research at the University of Natal he already knew where the gaps in the industry were that they would have to focus on.
As a nutritionist and systems analyst, and having been called in to investigate problems in many poultry operations throughout South Africa, he found it unbelievable that so little use was made of scientific methods in the decision-making process.
‘The consequence was that even the major producers were far from being as efficient as they could be,” he said. ‘I believed that this situation could be rectified if a more efficient system could be found to enable poultry producers to make the right decisions regarding the feeding and management of their birds.”
Gouws says a great deal of research has been conducted into poultry nutrition, physiology and environmental management, ‘but producers find it difficult both to keep up with the information being published and to apply it in practice.
‘In order to improve the rate of technology transfer to the industry, the latest information needs to be packaged in a way that is easy for the poultry producers to access and use.
‘Simulation models are the ideal way to achieve this. The aim of our project is to increase our understanding of the interaction of the animal with its food and its environment, so that the accuracy of the models that have been developed can be improved.”
The research is not only improving the efficiency of local producers, but it is making them more globally competitive. The team that he has built up, including Dr Neil Ferguson of the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg and Dr Colin Fisher in the United Kingdom, has produced some of the most accurate simulation models for the prediction of voluntary food intake in growing pigs and broilers, and these models are being used around the world.
Dr Munro Griessel of the Protein Research Trust says that the major advantage of the broiler nutrition optimiser is that overworked nutritionists do not need to spend time trying different scenarios in order to determine the most profitable way to feed broilers.
‘This programme does it all, as long as the inputs are sensible and reflect the financial, biological and environmental situation of the production units involved,” he says. ‘It has the potential to considerably improve the profitability of broiler production in this country, as well as making most efficient use of the available feed resources.”