In nature, fear protects animals from danger. In commercial settings, domestic laying hens are shielded from most fear-inducing stimuli, such as predators and unfamiliar situations. Therefore, fear serves as an aversive experience for the hens themselves and leads to undesired behaviors for producers.
In the opening session of Phibro Academy’s three-part webinar series, “Coccidiosis Tools and Strategies,” Greg Mathis, PhD, president of Southern Poultry Research, Inc., focused squarely on anticoccidials and the importance of long-term planning with rotation and shuttle programs.
The US-RSPE is a pre-competitive, multi-stakeholder organization focused on advancing sustainability across the entire US poultry and egg value chain. It designed the Sustainability Framework to provide the poultry and egg industry with a standardized approach to define and implement sustainability.
Amino acid requirements for laying hens are not well understood, primarily because data are lacking for the pullet stage. This gap is increasingly important as the table-egg industry wants to extend the hen’s life cycle to 100 weeks or more. Jo Ann Chew, graduate research assistant, University of Alberta, investigated how amino acid levels during rearing might impact body fat and the onset of lay.
Gut inflammation is common throughout poultry production, but its effects are not always visible. Birds deal with stress every day through changes in environment, feed adjustments, handling and exposure to coccidiosis and other intestinal diseases. All of these changes trigger the immune system to send a response to manage the inflammation.
Jonathan W. Moon, PhD, Mississippi State University, evaluated a combined evaporative cooling and sprinkler system relative to a conventional EC system in two commercial-sized broiler houses. How did the combined system affect broiler performance?
By Greg F. Mathis, PhD
and Brett Lumpkins, PhD
Southern Poultry Feed & Research, Inc,
Athens, Georgia
At the 2025 Poultry Science Association annual meeting, Michael Carroll, graduate assistant at Iowa State University, presented his research investigating whether dietary changes can produce a useful immune response to combat necrotic enteritis.
Industry experts, Steven Clark, DVM, Huvepharma’s veterinary technical services manager and Elizabeth Beilke, DVM, West Liberty Foods’ corporate veterinarian, were featured on the Iowa Turkey Federation’s Turkey Talkshow podcast to discuss the role of vaccines in coccidiosis management.
Woody breast, sometimes called wooden breast, has become a familiar and costly problem for today’s broiler industry, according to Cirenio Hisasaga, doctoral student at the University of California– Davis.
In the United States, the majority of laying hens are housed in conventional cages. However, there has been a shift towards cage-free systems. Cage-free systems can benefit laying hen welfare. Birds have opportunities to perform a full range of species-specific behaviors, including foraging, dustbathing, perching, and walking, which are restricted in conventional cages.
Poultry researchers use ‘affective valence’ — a positive or negative emotional response — as a measure of animal welfare. Tom Smulders, PhD, an evolutionary neurobiology researcher from Newcastle University, has studied whether hippocampal neurogenesis can be a marker of affective valence in poultry.
