UK Seaweed for healthy chicken meat (SeaWeedChick)

The overall objective of this project is to assess the feasibility of feeding UK grown seaweed to finisher broiler chickens to obtain multiple benefits arising from increased proportion of omega-3 fatty acids in poultry meat products and reduced reliance on soybean meal. Depending on where and how it is grown and harvested, seaweed likely has variable composition of protein and fatty acids, which significant difference between seaweed varieties and/or species. Thus, whilst literature studies can provide a baseline, testing under UK conditions of UK used varieties is required to explore its potential as poultry feed ingredient to produce meat with more beneficial fatty acid composition from feeds with reduced environmental impact due to seaweeds soybean meal replacement potential. Moreover, aiming to feed seaweed to finisher broilers only might reveal a greater potential than what historic data might suggest. Earlier literature (Ventura et al, 1994) showed a 10% inclusion upper limit for grower birds, whose gut is relatively under developed compared to finisher broilers. As such, finishers would have a greater anti-nutritional threshold, and due to their accelerated feed intake use most of the soybean meal in broiler meat production in the first place. Whilst the omega-3 in seaweed will readily impact on meat composition, owing to the monogastric nature of the broiler chicken, it has also great potential to improve gut health, arising from its immune-modulating functions. As such, an impact on gut microbiome can be anticipated, which could contribute to the use of seaweed to reduce reliance on antibiotics. The use of any feedstuff for animal feeding starts, however, with a clear identification of its nutritional value through detailed chemical analysis and digestibility studies, so to identify the level of standardised ileal digestible amino acids and apparent metabolizable energy, two key criteria for poultry feed formulation in poultry.
Overall project management for this feasibility study will be with CIEL, whilst Seaweed generation will undertake studies to optimising production and composition of seaweed under a variety of conditions. SRUC will investigate the potential for including seaweed in finisher poultry feeds, whilst UWL will undertake gut microbiome analysis and support the biochemical analysis of seaweed production.

SRUC component

1. Literature review on the use of seaweed in broiler rations
2. Determining the nutritional value of seaweed through specialist assessment of its standardised ileal amino acid digestibility and apparent metabolizable energy
3. Identifying optimal inclusion level of seaweed inclusion in broiler finisher rations at the expense of soybean meal and soy oil through dose-response experimentation using empirically determined nutritional value (2)
4. Analysis of carcass yield and composition, including biochemical analysis for fatty acid profiles from samples obtained from (3).