China is currently the largest importer and consumer of broiler chicken in the world because of the shift in protein consumption from pig to poultry in the country.  The country has a very low grandparent stock at the moment and therefore, has allowed the sourcing of grandparent stock from countries that were earlier banned because of the threat of AI in those regions. The local poultry farmers are also trying to increase their productions to gain maximum benefit from the current high demand. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the total number of slaughtered broiler chicken has hit 4.2 billion nationwide in the first six months of 2019 and total chicken production has reached up to 6.64 million metric tons, which is expected to increase further by the end of this year.

This current scenario is pushing the poultry farmers to search for feed options that will further optimize the production of broiler chickens and one of approach that has recently been developed by Ajinomoto Animal Nutrition Europe is the implication of customized amino acid approach, which gives the possibility to tackle the challenges of dependency on soybean meal, the waste of nitrogen as well as footpad dermatitis.  The new approach developed Ajinomoto in Europe aims at taking into account the economic response to each amino acid, their interaction and the qualification of the economic, social and environmental benefits.

Broilers fed diet low in protein only exhibit good technical performance when dietary amino acids are adequately supplied. However, with the new approach, an ideal amino acid profile is created to optimize broiler performance, which is the need of the Chinese broiler industry.  The requirements are expressed as a ratio to lysine, which is estimated by dose-response studies, integrated into a meta-analysis to take into account the variability lined to age, breed and statistical model.  Implicating the approach, dietary crude protein can be safely reduced while maintaining growth performance, feed efficiency, and cut-up yields. Furthermore, nitrogen excretion to the environment is known to be reduced by 10% for each point of dietary protein reduction due to reduced catabolism of excess amino acids.

The new approach to the use of amino acids will benefit the Chinese poultry farm producers as it will allow them to accelerate innovation in terms of adding more amino acids to reduce protein in feed formulation and using one silo instead of three. Moreover, it will also allow them to confine to the strict environmental regulations implemented by the Chinese government.

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