While terms like “free range” and “pasture raised” are increasingly common labels on chicken products, three professors in NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Science (CALS) are delving deeper to better understand the housing environment’s effect on poultry.
“There are pressures on the [poultry] industry to make some significant management changes to their broiler flocks to address concerns about animal welfare and sustainability,” says lead researcher Allison Pullin, assistant professor of animal welfare in the Prestage Department of Poultry Science.
The research project, supported with funds gifted by General Mills, compares two breeds of broiler chickens with different growth rates (conventional fast-growing or slow-growing). Both breeds were raised in an indoor conventional poultry barn or with daily access to an outdoor silvopasture, an agroforestry environment with trees and foliage. General Mills’ generosity also provided student research stipends and funding for other research expenses to fuel poultry science advances.
Pullin credits General Mills’ partnership to NC State alumna Brooke Bartz, an R&D specialist with the company. Bartz earned her master’s and Ph.D. in poultry science at NC State in 2016 and 2020, respectively. When General Mills pledged to adopt higher standards for animal welfare, Bartz suggested General Mills secure more data about the effects of housing environments on animal welfare, food safety and meat quality. She recommended they connect with NC State for help to generate data to inform best practices to improve these outcomes.
Initiatives like the “Better Chicken Commitment” and increasingly common claims like “free range” and “pasture raised” require slower-growing breeds, environmental changes or both. Modifying these management practices, says Pullin, could have significant economic impacts on farmers and consumers, so it is critical to have comprehensive evidence to justify the changes.
“Unfortunately, there’s limited research and evidence guiding some of those changes,” she says. “If we make changes too quickly, we may run into issues that could have negative impacts on animal welfare, food safety, meat quality and affordability.”
Comparing Environments
Before research began with live birds, General Mills funded the team to develop a literature review summarizing what is already known about outdoor access and growth rates for poultry welfare, food safety, meat quality, and economics.
The team learned that animal and product outcomes are highly variable with outdoor access environments and difficult to compare between studies because of the heterogeneity of breeds and farm conditions used. To develop reliable evidence to guide the industry, the team identified the need to standardize breeds and conditions to compare conventional production with outdoor access.
They set up a research project with two breeds of broiler chickens raised in two housing systems (conventional or silvopasture) that ran from August to October 2024. Each environment housed a flock of 250 chickens per breed: a fast-growing breed that matures in about six weeks and a slower-growing strain that takes eight to 10 weeks to reach a standard 6-pound weight.
The birds were divided into five replicate pens in each environment with 50 birds per pen. R&B Farms, a private farm in Angier, North Carolina, served as the site for the housing and paddocks for the silvopasture environment. NC State’s Chicken Education Unit in Raleigh housed the conventional indoor environment.
Researching Three Perspectives
The three professors involved in the study are each gathering data from a different perspective.
Animal Welfare
Pullin monitored the study from an animal welfare perspective. Using metrics like animal behavior, animal health and insights from psychology research on animals’ mental states, she studies how different management strategies affect poultry welfare.
For this project, Pullin is investigating how the two breeds behave in and utilize the two environments. Conventionally fast-growing breeds tend to become more inactive with age, which can make them prone to footpad dermatitis if they have prolonged contact with wet ground. Wet ground could occur in either environment from manure or water. Slower-growing breeds tend to be more active, which may improve leg health and utilization of space, particularly in the silvopasture system.
The two breeds are being evaluated to see if one may be more suitable for a certain environment over another. Measurements like footpad dermatitis, leg bone strength and stress hormones will be coupled with behavior analyses to understand how using the environment affects other metrics. Pullin’s graduate student Athena He-DeMontaron has been instrumental in the data collection efforts for her master’s thesis.
Meat Quality
Yan Campbell, an assistant professor and processing and products specialist who has a food science and technology background, is considering how the fresh meat quality differs between the two breeds and the two housing systems. Campbell’s graduate student Jean Caceres is currently working on collecting meat quality data for his master’s thesis research.
“Food companies want to know if the meat quality shows proof that it’s better for animals to be raised in an environment like a silvopasture,” Campbell says. “Our assumption is that it may taste better in some aspects, but can we find out? We will test qualities such as texture, composition, drip loss and cook loss, and will conduct a sensory descriptive study of the taste difference. We’ll also look at myopathy — a quality defect causing muscles to not develop properly, which can lead to chewier, tougher meat.”
Food Safety
And Lin Walker, assistant professor of applied microbiology, approached the project from a food safety angle. She studies how the micro load of Salmonella differs between the two production systems and examines the differences in the gut microbiomes in the chickens raised in the different environments.
Walker says there are many misconceptions among consumers regarding food safety, and as scientists, she and her peers are responsible for using scientific data to reveal the truth.
For example, “We think that birds might have better animal welfare when they’re raised in an outdoor environment,” she says. “But they are also exposed to all sorts of pathogens because the environment is less controlled. However, we need to find out if this exposure would really pose a risk in the poultry products for the consumers.”
Sharing the Findings
The live trial wrapped in early October, and the professors are analyzing the data. Pullin and Bartz present details of the NC State and General Mills partnership on Nov. 6 at the Emerging Research Showcase at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center in Durham.
Pullin anticipates the team’s findings will be shared in multiple peer-reviewed journals and other publications. While General Mills helped the study come to fruition, the data will benefit the entire poultry industry.
“Our impactful research could support companies trying to decide how to source their poultry proteins, which management practices to utilize and which types of genetic strains to pursue,” Pullin says.
Collaborations like these benefit not only the industry but also the university and its students. Pullin says most faculty members in her department have at least one project sponsored by an industry company or organization.
“As a land-grant institution, NC State’s mission is to serve the agriculture industry and to provide guidance, data and recommendations,” Pullin says. “Having these direct relationships with companies invested in what we’re doing helps us make real-world impact.”
What’s more, the General Mills collaboration provided opportunities for graduate students and undergraduate students to get involved in testing, research, data collection and professional development.
“Because of General Mills’ financial sponsorship, we are able to expose our graduate students to the opportunity of solving real-life problems,” Walker says.
STOP Foodborne Illness calls for stronger USDA action on poultry safety
From the beginning of the Biden Administration, STOP Foodborne Illness (STOP) has been representing people harmed by poultry-related Salmonella illnesses and supporting efforts underway at USDA to make poultry safer. This work is important to public health because contamination with Salmonella and Campylobacter makes poultry one of the riskiest components of our food supply.
STOP’s work is inspired by its constituents, including Amanda Craten and her son Noah, and many others who have been seriously injured by Salmonella in poultry. As a two-year old toddler, Noah was one of many victims of the 2013 outbreak caused by Salmonella Heidelberg in chicken. This deadly pathogen wracked Noah’s small body with infection, resulting in a brain abscess that required surgery and caused permanent damage that Noah will struggle all his life to overcome.
To prevent such tragedies, in January 2021 STOP partnered with fellow consumer groups and illness victims to petition USDA for replacement of USDA’s unenforceable “performance standards” with enforceable standards for Salmonella in raw poultry products. In September 2021, STOP joined with a coalition of major poultry companies, consumer groups, and independent experts in a letter to Secretary Vilsack calling for USDA to make this critical regulatory change.
We are pleased that USDA published its August 2024 proposal to set enforceable Salmonella standards for certain specific serotypes. The proposal establishes the principle that such standards are needed. We are also pleased that USDA will convene a public meeting on its proposed standards on Dec. 3.
We believe, however, that the USDA proposal falls far short of what is necessary to protect consumers because it covers just three of the many pathogenic serotypes of Salmonella and, by USDA’s estimate, addresses only 43 percent of poultry-related Salmonella illnesses. Under USDA’s proposal, chicken contaminated with dangerous serotypes, like Infantis and Heidelberg (the one that permanently injured Noah), can continue to flow into commerce, no matter how high the level of contamination. Consumers would remain at significant, preventable risk.
In anticipation of the December 3 USDA meeting, STOP has filed a comment with USDA (Docket No. FSIS-2023-0028) explaining why consumers reasonably expect and certainly deserve better. The Poultry Products Inspection Act explicitly directs and fully empowers USDA to act preventively on behalf of consumers. The USDA mark of inspection on every package of poultry makes an implicit promise to consumers that USDA and poultry processors are doing everything they reasonably can to make poultry safe.
As outlined in our comment to USDA, we call on the USDA and poultry companies to live up to that promise by broadening their lens on what’s needed and what’s possible to protect consumers from Salmonella illnesses. USDA can give real meaning to the mark of inspection by covering more serotypes and complementing them with an enforceable Salmonella species standard.
The end of the Biden administration is not the end of society’s effort to make poultry safe. The public health problem and the reasonable expectations of consumers are not going away. Everyone wins if government, industry, and consumers continue the work, and USDA acts boldly.
Source: Food Safety News
**The opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, beliefs, or positions of PoultryProducer.com**