In recent years, Bonafarm-Bábolna Feed Ltd. has been offering its Silver, Gold and Platinum diets for turkey growers. These three diet lines have been renewed several times and have become well differentiated in price and nutrient content over the years, thus enabling turkey producers to select and feed to their flocks the diets most closely meeting the specific characteristics of their farms. These well-proven turkey diets of our company have been used by the producers with great satisfaction and good production results over several years.
However, the recent unprecedented feed price explosion and the unpredictability of the meat market require increasingly high and more optimal production levels. The producers are also trying to minimise their production costs in the most reasonable manner possible. As the feed costs constitute a major part and a steadily increasing proportion of the production costs, it is obvious that all producers wish to feed their flocks with the most economical diets that are of the highest possible quality and best adjusted to the specific raw material cost situation. The specialists of Bonafarm-Bábolna Feed Ltd. rise to all these challenges by developing a new, innovative diet and with their expert knowledge. This is how our AMINO turkey diet range was created.
In the classical sense of the word, crude protein is one of the most important and most expensive nutrients of the diet. However, turkeys do not have a crude protein requirement: only the amino acids constituting the protein should be supplied to them with the diet. The quality of the protein contained by the feed is determined by the biological value depending on the essential and non-essential amino acids and by the digestibility of the amino acids. The supplementation of any possibly limiting amino acid in synthetic form provides a possibility for lowering the crude protein content and to establish the ideal ratio of digestible amino acids related to lysine. This process is greatly facilitated by the fact that over the recent years more and more synthetic amino acids have become available for feed manufacture. In addition to methionine, lysine, threonine, valine and tryptophan, which were being used widely already earlier, now it is possible to use other synthetic amino acids, primarily isoleucine and arginine. The AMINO turkey diet range contains also these amino acids which have become available recently. The use of new amino acids is one of the conditions necessary for economically viable nutrition, as the reduction of the feed costs accounting for more than two thirds of the total production cost of turkey fattening can be achieved by optimising the protein and amino acid content of the compound feeds. Beyond that, the unnecessary protein excess or amino acid imbalance loads the intermediary metabolism of the birds and increases the nitrogen burden of the environment.
Besides the good feed, the body weight of pre-reared grower turkeys is also very important in turkey production. The main objective of turkey brooding is to provide high-quality turkeys for the grow-out stage. Therefore, in addition to the high digestibility of the feed it is also important for the birds to be able to develop a robust skeletal structure. This greatly contributes to the success of the later grow-out stages characterised by high muscle mass accretion.
One of our first feeding trials conducted with the AMINO turkey diets was started at the Bérbaltavár farm of Three-B Farm Ltd. The farm keeps precise records, and it has had good professional relations with our company for several years. The experimental batch comprising 19,920 Converter day-old poults were placed on 19 February 2021. No animal health problems occurred during brooding. The body weight gain of the flock conformed to the technological specifications throughout the cycle. The birds developed nicely and were lively and agile throughout the brooding phase. The batch was transferred to the grow-out unit after 44.5 days of brooding on average, with an average body weight of 2.63 kg per bird. At the end of the brooding period, the average weight of the females was 2.47 kg per bird, while that of the males was 2.84 kg per bird. The feed conversion ratio was 1.67 kg/kg and the mortality rate was 4.01%. The achieved production results prove that the development of these products reached its goal. For us, the most important feedback is always our partner’s opinion: in this case Three-B Farm Ltd. was maximally satisfied with the results achieved.
In summary, our newly developed AMINO turkey diet range can successfully meet the challenges posed by the present and the future. With its unique synthetic amino acid content, composition and nutrient content, this diet range provides an economical feeding solution for turkey growers even at the current feed prices. Moreover, the use of the new synthetic amino acids represents a very substantial potential for the turkey producers, which must be utilised to the greatest possible extent in order to maintain the competitiveness of turkey production and also for environmental protection reasons.
Szabolcs Horváth
Poultry Consultant
Bonafarm-Bábolna Feed Ltd.
