[Music] thank you I love to share with you today ways how we address the nutritional needs of our layers and non caged system and in fact maybe two you think about what are the needs of those birds it's very well known that hens and non caged system have at least 3% additional feed intake in fact if they have access to the outdoors food intake can be up to 10 to 20 percent more than their counterparts harvesting cages we know that the feed conversion ratio can be six seven percent higher overall we see a really large variety we also know that with really good husbandry skills we can outperform even caged systems however that energy nutritional energy that spent in non caged hens unlock emotion on thermal regulation has been taken into account in feed formulation and the German Institute for nutrition for example recommends that there should be at least 10 percent additional energy compared to the hens house and cages for barn hens and in free-range about 15 percent so that's applied in a lot of german-speaking countries but also in a lot of other countries as well but no matter if we take this additional energy into account or if we don't the fact is that in the poultry industry we're one of the very few industries that feed all the hens or all birds within one system one single diet in contrast dairy or pigs for example also fattening cows and feed Lots routinely equipped with RFID tags radio frequency identification tags which allows a feeding device or a milking cow sell to detect the individual animal measure its meat milk yields in the morning and if that cow has delivered so many liters of milk there's the additional chopped up feet when it goes into the feeding system similar to pigs similar to little little calves the individual recognition or the tracing of those animals allows for very precise feeding in a very precise use of resources of the nutrients but also financially that we're not wasting any energy to birds for example that never laid an egg to birds that are somewhere in the Avery system are a lot of exposed to outdoor environment and it might have varied ditional requirements because we feed based on the average flock performance on our average flock parametres flock uniformity is the key parameter that we all work with and that we'd like to achieve so body weight is here our major concern and then the average flock performance however the dilemma is if we have all these hens in the loose husbandry system we also want a very even use of that Avery system of the range of the floor we don't want all the hens rush to the feeders exactly the same time we want to make sure if hens use the upper feeder system every system the lower Avery system they are on the floor they are on the range so we prevent overcrowding we prevent smothering and without associated stress mortalities and misplaced eggs the reality in fact is that we may very well calculate carefully our 10 or 12 centimeter feeder space per hen but we've shown that for example in five different flocks indicated in this graph in the five different box plots hadn't spent in an Avery system about nearly double their time on the lower fee dirtier than they're doing yo feeding feed it to you that's the the world we live in at the moment and what we take into account and we were wondering what consequences of that work would be and and if we could do any better and I think we can but it's not only the use of the Avery system if we allow hens to go on a range it's also an uneven use of the range space in this gray graph that you see by Gifford Hinrich where she looked at 10 different commercial flocks of various sizes between 2,000 and 18,000 hens per flock you could see there's always a certain percentage of hen about 13% of hens that do not go out there the couch potatoes or the shy Birds or however you want to call them birds that are reluctant to leave the henhouse for whatever reasons and in contrast you have about 20 had about 20% of individuals that would God a hundred percent of their available days so just as well in this audience there might have been your 20% who ran out did the marathon this morning before coming to the conference there were the couch potatoes like me who just stayed at the breakfast buffet and just kept being indoors in the green roof you'll see some data that we we collected of a very young flock within their first three weeks where they had exposure to arranged and once again we had this about 15 percent of hens 14 percent of hands that did not go out spend zero to ten percent of their available days on the range and then a growing population of birds that were curious that would go and venture on the range and we know that range use is affected by age by genetics by experience the number of pop holes the weather outside but every farmer has certain populations that stays in the shed and I'll refer to those at stairs and a certain populations of birds that gar and range the Rangers and anything in between our Roma's so the percentage might differ but every farm has the couch potatoes every farmer has the marathon runners and what does that mean they've been numbers research studies who looked at the different ranging behavior and why that might happen but I was interested in to find reasons where we can actually put some meaning into that and say what does that mean for me as a nutritionist what does that mean for me as a farmer which birds are actually laying eggs which ones are the ones I have to be concerned about and maybe manage a little bit differently so I will share with you today some preliminary data of of a three year project that's coming to an end next month finally where we where we categorize subpopulations of hens based on their ranges and we match those range activities with performance of time they spent on the feed but also welfare and health characteristics and in order to do so we found a commercial egg producer who allowed us to modify their shed their sheds several of those and what you can see here is a snapshot of the range where you'll see some fencing along the lines where farm the farmer allowed us to partition eyes inside the hen house and the sections in-between the Avery system and then all along the way extending the fences to the end of the range which allowed us to monitor a characteristic randomly selected sub population of a commercial flock monitor those hens for the range activities and how they would use the Avery system this figure is a horizontal yeah a top-down view of the sheds over 40,000 hens in the shed partition eyes as you'd see it in any commercial or non cash system into about five thousand hens group and we went in and had five sections narrowed down with about 625 hands in each of this section to allow for the same stocking density then the hens and the rest of the shed are and we partitioned eyes them all the way through inside on the house and on the range so the birds couldn't mix and we had those color-coded with leg band to avoid any unforeseen chickens digging through hopping through a fence or anything else similar this is the cross section of the shed and so you are able to see - Avery systems who run along the shed and in the red dots are showing the antenna that we placed along the feeding chains about 15 centimeters to the right and to the left RFID antenna at the entrance to the nest box and on top of the Avery system we also had the RFID antenna at the inside and the outside of the pop holes which allowed us to trace the hens with the directionality so we could see if they're going out on on the range they just sit on the pop hole or if they yeah just having a quick look and going back into the house those birds over there have these yellow leg bands and the yellow leg band is the passive RFID leg band microchipped similar to dog or cat or a horse that you'd ship for traceability and you can see in white along the feeder chain on the bottom and along the pop hole on the top picture the RFID antenna that are actively driven and then you have the heat density plot when we validated the method which allows us to detect any tag with on attached to a hand on a leg band that would hop over it so with every individual hand that we used we were able to trace the time they spent on the range the number of days they went and also the time they spent in the feed OSIS on the feeding system or the times that went to hop into the nest box we had about so we monitored six flocks in total 18,750 hands which we weighed individually put a numbered leg band on so at the end of lay 72 weeks we were also able then to match the individual ranging and body weight and health data with every hen we monitored replace these hens when they were 16 weeks of age and they were allowed to go on the range the following week and between 18 and 20 weeks of age we looked at their daily range shoes and then at 22 weeks or 21 week at the end of that week we caught those birds looked at the number of their leg band and were able to say your hand that hasn't been outside a single day in the last three weeks or you've been a hand that's been outside every single day and then we regrouped those hands into a group of stayers so Oh 600 625 hands they were arranging the least promise anything in between and we also had about 60% of the hens we assigned to three groups which were the Rangers so those were the hens they've been outside the majority of their time we then went on and monitored the ranges of these birds until 72 weeks of age and because they were in this distinct partitions we were able to go into the shed every ten weeks and collect eggs of that distinguished group so you can see in this picture they're the color-coded egg trays that were used where of all the group of stairs every 10 weeks we collected the eggs for seven days in a row put them on the commercial grading floor and therefore would get the information about the egg performance and their output same with the Rangers and and the Roma's what you can see here is the result of three replicate flocks and to all our surprise we were expecting quite frankly the Rangers not to perform as well because they were all on the same diet all the same management condition and you heard before that we thought they needed an extra 10% or 15% to flourish however in this green graph over there to representing our Rangers you see that they can significantly earlier into life so when we collected the eggs at 22 weeks of age there were about more than 15 percent higher in their egg performance compared to those purple layers layers so the stars indicate significance if you do your math and you know how much 1% of egg production means to your farm or what your profit is in the dozens of eggs in between you come to the conclusion that there's actually quite a significant opportunity of eggs that you lose if you would just house stairs only if you would restrict their allowance on the range until later on however this day is called up 32 and then 42 weeks of age and then you can see that drop there that farm was affected with fowl cholera and it just seemed to be that the stairs may not have been able to cope as well as the Rangers did and then we have a slow decline in in all of those groups Surry raised the question number one is that is that early into lay is that a consequence of the exposure to sunlight as a trigger to start laying what does that mean for us nutritionally and how do we dress that very different stage of performance those birds are in of course 72 weeks of lay egg performance or laying performance and percentage is one of the parameters but eggshell quality or egg quality also is and there were no statistical significant differences between the ranges and the stairs at any time point so there's no compromise on the air quality but of only the egg quantity there were no difference on the eggshell quality and we were wondering what are the other consequences between the stairs and the ranges that we may need to take into account so we did a sub sample of a certain number of hens on the bones and you can see there the images when we put them through the micro CT scanner and did all the you know bone gnashing bone breaking strings as where we looked at the blood vessel branching as an opportunity for calcium metabolism and we couldn't find any differences between the stairs and the Rangers we also couldn't find any correlation between the duration of time they spent on the range or in the shed heel bone damage was another thing where we didn't see any difference so far alright so how can we explain that different what are the other patterns that we can see between the stays and the ranges and in order to understand not only the use of the range but also the consequence of the use of the henhouse and the feeder chains we we visualized and plotted all the data that we saw so in this cross section over here you can see the rangers represented with the green circles and the stay is in the blue triangles and you can already see that the blue triangles the stea birds are on top of the Avery system predominantly while the Rangers that go onto the range come in the house and they only go on the bottom of the Avery system and that's where their feet they can't be bothered to climb all the way up again but very similarly the Rangers the stairs don't come all the way down they are stuck on top and when you go through the henhouse and check for your birds these are the ones on top of the Avery system who are just not performing as well we I have a little video animation to show you to demonstrate that this is what you actually see throughout the day it's the same setup as you've just seen in the slide emphasizing that the stay is stay on top of the Avery system the Rangers predominantly used the bottom nest boxes are used by both of them so the time changes this is in the morning about 5:00 to 5:30 to 6:00 o'clock and as time goes on you can see that the size of the symbols representing a different flock percentage changes so there you go birds are all feeding using actively the feeding chains pop holes are open birds are going out on the range without midday now getting into the midday heat birds are going more into the into the shed and once again very clearly that these rangers only use the lower feeding chains getting in the afternoon pop off closing hands are back into the system and we have a few of them probably roosting on Ethan next to the but that's about it all right so what are the consequences of these observations we can clearly distinguish performance groups and they are associated we saw populations not only on the ranges but I see in the henhouse do we need to go and encourage those subpopulations to mix do we need to encourage the stayers to come down and go outside into the Sun line Monisha collection party did sample those hints and looked at their behavior and fishy found the stairs to be more fearful towards novel objects more scared than compared these ranges which might explain why they're less likely to God and explore and we know that early life intervention during rearing and their experiences will increase the likelihood of a hand to range and to explore later on in life so do we need to tackle those problems within the rearing where we need to modify and encourage to have more encouraged hence we also looked in the consequences of energy metabolism and Manisha will give a presentation on that later on in the short sessions and we really might want to consider should we offer different diets on the top feeding chains compared to the bottom feeding chains which is very well doable another opportunity opportunity that we may have to consider is using some of those and feeding stations RFID feeding stations that were developed by the University of Alberta where Martin suitors uses those to look into uniform 100% uniform body weights of breeding of breeder birds where he has smaller groups and the bird that goes into the feeding station and sits on a scale and only if it has a certain body weight it gets its feet otherwise it stays empty so a bit like the dairy cows who only get fed based on their performance we hypothesized initially that these ranges would be the birds who would benefit and need more energy in their diet or would need to benefit or would yea experience a deficiency of some sort and therefore when we selected those birds we had three groups of Rangers which even you know a comparable range usage where we kept one under conventional conditions such as the other ones in the shin one group of Rangers that had an additional by secure feeding station on the range and I don't want to encourage you know ranged feet or anything at all but it was to understand the nutritional need of those birds and if there would be any benefit from a lack of nutrients or energy that they would experience and the third group we treated were with an other with a different feed where we had 10% metabolizable energy in a 10% increase in amino acids in their diets those birds we're still housed under the same conditions but we closed their feeder chains and had miniature feeder chains built in next to the original feeder chains that would feed all the other hands in the shed so we were able to feed those birds a different diet but having exactly the same conditions as you know yeah the rest of the birds in the commercial system this is the treatment diet that we fed about stats in kilocalories was a bit about 11.6 mega joules in the conventional diet and twelve point six mega joules in the plus ten percent energy died and you can see that we achieved that additional energy mostly due to the inclusion of fat while the protein levels were the same but the essential amino acids such as digestible lysine was then elevated and the other proteins would follow so balanced protein diet and you can see here that these green Rangers which we already thought were performing quite well could even do better so these Rangers in gray which had the additional 10% energy in their diet where come outperforming the other groups at 52 and 62 and then at 72 weeks of age so we even this high achieving birds can do better if we feed them specifically now if that's commercially wanted because of the cost of the diet and the additional number of egg output remains everyone but we can support these overachievers even better than we're currently doing once again eggshell breaking strengths was not significantly different between any of the groups and the values are pretty similar to the one Cormac has shown so relatively constant and not too bad I believe looking at a few health health or welfare parameters of those birds we found that overall the feather cover was quite good so every individual birds by now 15,000 hence we scored at 72 weeks of age one by one and we performed a necropsy in every of those birds as well and you can see here that the feather cover so the feather score goes to four fully covered 2:1 no feathers similar to what we've we've heard previously and while the overall feather score was was pretty good with an average something between three to four the worst cover we've seen on the chest but within these different ranges and stairs and different feeding groups you can see that the purple ones are always of lowest value the purple stairs had the lowest neck feather cover the purple stairs had the lowest chest feather cover the lowest wing feather cover and the back and that's in line with a lot of research that we've seen before where it's always been proposed ok the rain birds on the range have more feathers than the birds inside and feather cover effect significantly also the nutrients and and their ability for the thermal regulation when we performed the necropsy we scored for fatty livers and spotty livers spots on the liver spot a liver disease can feel back to hepaticus we see that quite a bit in Australia at certain times and you can see this is a mosaic plot to compare nominal and ordinal data and the stars in decay a significant difference from the mean sir our stayers had significantly more fatty liver scores than the mean of the flock that we've observed where the ranges with the outdoor feeders were significantly better and similarly we could see less scores and spotty liver in the stays and the Roma's with the rangers being most affected so those birds that do go outside we're more likely to catch spotty liver or other diseases and when we usually think of the average flock or we compare caged and free-range we all always think it's the flock that's affected but we could open the birds and at some stage we saw spots on the liver spots on the liver spots on the liver and all of the sudden or spots anymore so even though we were working within the same flock there was a distinct differentiation between the birds that state in the shed and the birds that went outside so you would think you carried some diseases all through anyway but the different subpopulations are affected differently which are is also then reflected in their health so in summary the hen subpopulations differ significantly in their performance at certain times they also differ significantly in their health and welfare status if we change the nutrient supply we can manipulate the egg and the flock productivity and potential solutions might include modification of the henhouse and the hand management such as pushing hands down encourage them to go and explore it more offer different feed at the different levels not to waste certain components and in the future maybe we really need to think how we prevent those subpopulations or how we manage them once we have them on farm we also found the use of the big data and the computer assistant learning really really useful in a powerful tool to understand in depth what's happening with our use of the resources use of the different feeder chains at times use of this box we hope that it can help us to find solution to support those underperforming hens and the farmers were quite keen and interested to get this information in real time where one day hopefully you can have a nap and go like subpopulations are happening now us they are not coming down anymore rather than waiting a couple of days until you can see a picture puzzling together based on their grading data so yeah we hope to to encourage some discussion about the different subpopulations and how we can use that information to be more targeted in the desired performance and where care outcomes that we after thank you very much [Applause]