[Music] thank you for your kind introduction and my thanks the organizing committee for giving me the opportunity to join you this morning and thanks to all of you for turning out after the gala dinner my paper is recent developments in practical aspects of duck feeding but I think you'll probably see as I proceed is there's a bigger emphasis on the practical and how as a commercial nutritionist I'm tending to interpret the data that is available and the impact of different systems that we have at the risk of repeating the useful information that Professor who presented I just like to go through some of the information I have on the global duck market it's not in as much detail I like summary data and bullet points but the estimation is that globally there's about five billion ducks produced each year and of these 3.8 billion are Peking type and I emphasize the word type because there's quite a significant number of different genetic strains which has a big impact on the way that we feed individual units there's another one point two billion ducks which are the Muscovy Barberie type these are crossed with peking types to give you the mule there are egg strains and their local breeds which makes feeding or the nutrition of these different ducks more complicated for a commercial person the figures suggest that of the poultry meat consumed in the world approximately eight percent is duck meat but this figure is very heavily skewed by the popularity of duck in the Chinese market and we estimate that 31 percent of poultry meat consumption in China is duck which in turn means that for the rest of us in the rest of the world we're only eating 3% which gives a huge opportunity for the duck industry to expand and it is a very popular meeting inserting in the West for a special occasion but the size of the market brings its own problems when we're looking at information and again professor who noted that there is rarely to be different work that's been published recently and we have to compete with the vastly bigger chicken sector quite a lot bigger turkey sector in terms of kilograms of meat produce but only at 0.5 billion birds a year and then seven billion laying hens so if you're an academic seeking funded commercial research the money is where the chickens are and that's obviously an issue that we have in the duck sector that we don't have the volume of research work being conducted now there are all sorts of ducks available as you can see from this slide we have the the meat group and then we have the egg group and within those groups we have a range of different breeds the peak in is by far and away the largest and then comes the Muscovy all the barbary and I'm particularly fond of the Muscovy or the Barbary duck I used to keep them as pets when I was a small boy duck called Bertie I also kept some of these khaki Campbell's which were incredible and again I'm going to come on to a little bit later look at the growth performance of the the duck versus the chicken and these ducks he even 30 years ago were producing something like 320 eggs per bird in 52 weeks out vastly outstripping the commercial layer estate but my paper will focus entirely on the peaking meat duck because that's where the majority information lies we've seen huge improvements in the genetic improvement of the Peking duck from the 1920s to the beginning of this century a 49 day wait increased from less than 2 kilos prepared to greater than 4 kilos prepared I'm sure you'd agree that is a significant improvement feed conversion has also reduced from 3 to less than 2.5 and there are some strains which are very efficient and they're achieving feed conversions of 1.8 or less at about 35 days with a carcass weight in a region of 3 to 3.2 putting it into context if we take the guides from the major chicken bridges avid journal Cobb and we compare that with figures provided by the Peking Duck breeders we can see that seven-day weight of a Peking duck is a quarter of a kilo compared to broiler chicken of 185 grams so from the very beginning these birds are growing much quicker albeit from a larger egg and the larger day old size and at 42 days the duck is clearly outstripping to broiler chicken by a considerable margin in terms of body weight potential so this in itself has a significant impact on how we think about feeding the duck and it'll be a theme that comes up all the way through is that a duck is not a waterproof chicken then we have to remember that in every aspect of feeding these birds the early stages of development is obviously clearly important for this skeleton and we have this very rapid early growth and because of the genetic ancestry of the duck we can see that there are significant differences between the duck and the chicken the duck leg bone growth plateaus at about five weeks of age but the chicken continues to grow its bone and this has been very well summarized by Duggan and more recently by a Zhang itself and this paper is not included in my written paper because it's a recent one that I found but they both showed that the duck leg bone growth and mineralization tends to plateau much earlier than the chicken the duck has a correspondingly slower development of wing skeleton structure and also breast meat and these are all postulated to be due to the ancestry from the mallard duck the wild Mallard and based on the frightened flight aspect in terms of a young duckling will run from a predator to seek water and hence escape whereas a chicken and try and flap its way into vegetation and then the later development of the breast meat is that duck didn't need to grow its breast muscles until it was ready for migration so obviously thinking of the skeleton we're considering mainly mineral nutrition and we see big differences between the broiler and the chicken and a very useful piece of work was published in 2005 by Road hot Scott shows that there are huge levels available phosphorus required in the early age whereas a duck matures and it's bone development tends to come towards an end the available phosphorus requirement drops and this needs to be matched with a calcium ratio about two to one and certainly from practical experience I've clearly seen benefits from increasing the available phosphorus in the first two three weeks of life in terms of leg strength so we look at the previously published information from sources like NRC and we can see that you know we do need to move on and take into account there the differences in genetics just for interest the broiler guy from the broiler breeder company guide shows that the chicken has significantly lower available phosphorus requirement it's also been published recently that there may even be a higher requirement to optimize growth and skeletal development in the first four days and looking at available phosphorus levels of 0.6 another factor that as a commercial nutritionist I have to take into account is the influence of environment and again we saw some lovely sites from professor who but we take the same genetics around the world and we impose all sorts of different environments on them we have the water-based systems that you saw earlier we have semi housing again with good access to water we have typical UK type straw barns where the birds are bedded on straw with open sided housing so it's big influence of temperature we have the more tropical Holiday Beach Resort accommodation and then we have the really intensive broiler ization in climates where the outside temperature can be as low as minus 20 in the winter through to plus 35 in the summer and birds are growing in houses of 35,000 so we've got some extremes here but a more typical slatted or y floor based system in the more temperate climates so what does this environmental effect have well there is a couple of authors Gerry and Maurice who did a lot of looking at the impact of stocking density and they developed an equation to predict the the live weight response at different stocking densities and we can see quite clearly if I can point it out to you that compared to birds grown at four point one square Birds per square meter after about 17 days as you increase the stocking density there is a marked reduction in live weight gain so we're looking at a 30% reduction as we take the stocking density up to 12 Birds so the impact of this on audio 8 is absolutely phenomenal so when you're running a commercial operation and an accountant is scrutinizing the figures and wanting to maximize kilos per square meter of housing we can see that we get to a point where it's very difficult to get much above 32 kilos per square meter in high stocking densities I have seen occasions where we've got 234 kilos but then we are using extremely high dense diets to overcome the stocking density issue environmental temperature also has an impact we tend to think of ducks has been fairly forgiving in terms of temperature and that they will exist or will thrive at relatively low temperatures but again if we go down to zero degrees there is an impact on live weight but the big impact is as you increase the temperature we see a big drop-off in live weight so again we need to take that into account when we're feeding and interpreting scientific literature because these changes in live weight are predominately driven by feed intake and again it becomes a classic example of birds don't eat percentages the grams per day they milligrams per day or per unit of body weight and so we have to take all of these external factors into account in terms of amino acid nutrition it's been clearly demonstrated that there is differences between chickens and ducks it's not a water proof chicken and Hjelm Brecht in 2012 and a paper at a symposium in Brazil summarized that very nicely and that we might see differences in amino acid profile rather than taking the typical broil approaches stepping down amino acid levels in diets as you moved from one to the other we have to think a little bit harder about the duck because it has a different growth profile in terms of its feathering and there's a proportion of body weight the duck has hugely more feathers than a chicken would and that we have different Metheny requirements for body weight for feed conversion and for feather cover and again is some geographies harvesting the feathers is very important and we've seen always been recorded that feather development has a peak that we see a marked increase in feather development at about 20 days in peaking strains we can influence the primary feather length by the level of total sulfur amino acids in the diet and again going back to the helm brake paper it was demonstrated they're looking at three different phases of nutrition that there was a marked increase in response to Matheny levels in the mid phase compared to the early diet and the later died so contrary to what we would normally expect to see we're looking at that's feeding a higher sulfur amino acid content in that mid period 15 to 35 days to support both growth feed conversion and further development there is some published work and I obviously defer to professors whose exceptional summary of the amino acid requirements but as a commercial nutritionist I'm trying to look at data that I can use first point that I would make is that we have lots of different breeds and they all have being bred for different markets within the UK we have three main strains there's one that's grown for very lean meat with very low feed conversion we have one at the other extreme which is a very large very fat bird grown for the Chinese restaurant market the nutrient requirements of those strains are markedly different so it will be useful for my point of view to be able to identify what strain the work has been done on and out of this short list of papers that I've looked at you can see there's only three where the breed is clearly identified I'm afraid peaking or white peeking is not a great deal of use unless we know the exact strain it's also useful to know the gender of the birds but just looking at the amino acid profiles we can see there are quite significant differences between different authors recommendations and it makes it difficult to interpret that the cursors are come on to later we've also got to consider the raw materials that we use so for example if we look just at lysine we've got recommendations here are total amino acids we have available amino acids and then we have si D amino acids that's probably very very useful because we use generally si D amino acid values for chickens but looking at the values you can see there's a huge discrepancy and maybe some of these discrepancies arise from the management system that's applied again very few papers identify the stocking density on the environment of the birds are kept in one or two we'll say that there are my flaws but otherwise we don't know kilos per square meter it's not too much of a problem to 21 days because the duck is quite tolerant until that age the impact of stocking density really starts to kick in from 1718 days through 21 days onwards again we saw some lovely photographs earlier of all the different products from the duck and the duck he's incredibly versatile and it's grown for different reasons in different geographies and this is some data that I was pleased to receive from a friend at Cherry Valley and Rae and she provided me the information looking at the value per kilo and I come from an area where we grow birds for breast meat so it seems strange to me that the breast meat which is highlighted here has a relatively low value compared to all of these other parts that we would regard as by-product waste pet food meat and bone meal so up here somewhere there's kale that we've got heads feet necks giblets gizzard and so on so again the duck is very very versatile and it's grown for different reasons and again the search may well be directed towards these these different components that the market is seeking can we use lower protein diets we've heard a number of papers this week about environmental sustainability responsible agriculture and so on and the same is beginning to apply to feeding ducks can we go to lower protein and certainly it seems possible possible if we use in crystalline amino acids and again this is where there might be a similarity with chicken is there seems to be this point about 15% crude protein where the wheel falls off the cart even with synthetic amino acids being employed but having said that we've also seen within the duck research there are significant responses to amino acid levels in later growth and I wonder if we are struggling because we haven't got the ideal protein profile that we're lucky enough to work with in the chicken sector turkey sector and the layer sector and it would certainly be nice to be able to see a recommendation and some work looking at the interrelationship between amino acids so we can relate all the amino acids back to lysine as we do with other poultry species so for the time being I'm more than happy to work with Evonik recommendations it's as good a place to start as any and I'm sure many of you are familiar with the data which gives us the ability to relate individual amino acids back to till I seen we may not necessarily agree with the amino acid levels cited as being the requirement in the diet that has a percentage of lysine I have no argument with with these figures because I don't have any better data in terms of energy there are all sorts of responses and it's confounded by environment and temperature as I mentioned earlier the duck has a thermal neutral zone of about 8 to 23 degrees which is quite wide but from practical experience we certainly see that once the brooding period is ended we don't want to drop much below 15 degrees if we drop below 15 degrees we start seeing a fall-off in feed conversion efficiency and equally if we go above 20 25 degrees the feed intake drops and growth rate suffers but more but recently we have seen papers that show a response to higher energy values particularly in the later growth period but again as we've seen this morning that there are responses to amino acids with those higher energy so again nutrient density overall needs to be increased if we're pushing for low feed conversion and maximum body weight gain we need to keep energy and amino acids in balance we do play tricks with the ducks we do try and force them to over consume energy to increase the carcass fat for specific Marcus market requirements and we tend to do that using high levels of added fat in the diet so the energy value is influenced by environment genetics and the carcass requirement so I've got a very broad figure of 12 to 13 mega joules per kilo which to a commercial nutritionist I know is absolutely no use whatsoever but I would suggest looking at what I do with peaking tip type ducks I work with we're probably looking in the late stage about 12.5 12.6 mega joules post 21 days that brings me on to feed program we see a lot of the recommendations are to diets we certainly see that reflected in the published research literature about nutrient requirements they're looking at diets typically 1 to 21 days and then 22 days through to a slaughter age there was a very nice piece of work I think by saying that demonstrated responses to higher energy in a high amino acids when you dig down into that paper a bit more and then you refer back to the hell Brecht work looking at Metheny response you start thinking well commercially maybe we should be feeding at least three different diets to these birds to optimize the growth performance and avoid over or under feeding during particular periods of the birds life and we can take into account the late energy response that's been demonstrated again we need to determine whether we're working with select or unselected strains is being demonstrated by cherry amorous that you take a high-density diet and feed it to a selected strain and you'll get a response in performance whereas if you do the same to an unselected strain you'll just wait wasting nutrition so I was certainly propose a three-stage feeding program coming on to raw materials it's well established that there are differences in digestibility of ingredients number of authors have worked on this subject and taking just a summary from clothes and rodents that scored and we can see that the duck is not particularly efficient in relation to the broiler chicken in the turkey in digestion of protein and amino acids but it holds its head up quite well in terms of energy from the same author in the same paper so maybe we have to take from to count that the duck can extract a bit more energy from its feed and the other species we looked at a paper presented by Zayn which was very very useful indeed in terms of it gave the diet formulation and the rations used they determined si D amino acid values through their own laboratory and we thought well how do we stack up win terms of our ROM T or matrix that we use for chickens so we as a company have a raw material database so we applied that to the raw materials used in diet formulation and we've compared them here and I'm pleased to say and I know before you say did we know the proximate analysis of all the raw materials used we didn't so he's an estimate but I found it quite reassuring that with the exception of threonine on the amino acid front we had pretty good correlation which makes you think that for the time being maybe we can continue with the chicken data we didn't get quite such good correlation with the energy so can we use chicken values well we've got no choice there aren't enough duck values around to generate a robust raw material matrix and again Road has scored said in his review in 2015 that there is no clear inclusion as to what the value should be and how they differ although there is a similar trend in relationships between within raw materials there are inconsistencies and the magnitude of difference is raw material related so maybe we need to control our diets by constraints on raw material levels rather than nutrient levels and there are always going to be differences between laboratories and Mateos has summarized this quite nicely and this will be a point I'm making for any poultry species in that you've got a stick with a lab or a reference source that you know a new trust because all of these are well-respected Institute's but they're all giving different energy values for an ingredient as calmness maize and I think we have to bear that in mind when we're looking at raw material values for ducks and the digestibility values that there will be inconsistencies between laboratories so in summary the Peking Duck was developed from the wild Mallard and it continues to portray some of those traits from its ancestors and we have to be mindful of those environment and housing have a huge impact on the Ducks growth performance we need to take those into account when we're formulating diets and we have different nutrient requirements in different periods of life compared to other poultry species so particularly mindful of early skeletal development and feather development so I think there will be a benefit to three or even four stage feeding programs we need to take into account the market that the birds are being grown for and obviously mindful the fact that there are clearly differences in raw material digestibility between ducks and chickens and we need a robust database and I would welcome any data that comes for on there but until then we're stuck with the chicken stuff and we have to make do with it so finally please remember that ducks are not water proof chickens and that maybe is commercial nutritionists where this parrot interpreting between the duck and the chicken thank you very much [Applause]