Ammonia monitoring and impacts on chicken bodyweight: a real-life example

A recent ?? WATT Poultry article on ammonia management brought back memories of one of the best examples I have seen of the impacts this noxious gas can have on bird growth. Sponsored by Jones-Hamilton Co. , the article highlights how high ammonia levels negatively affect feed conversion and broiler chickens' body weight.

The main problem with ammonia is knowing when you have an issue. Most producers become tolerant to the smell of ammonia after many years tending to chickens. They cannot trust their own observations to assess ammonia exposure. Paper strip tests or even handheld devices share a common flaw: they will monitor the levels when a person is in the house to take the measure. And guess what? At that time, ventilation is usually running at normal speed and ammonia levels are often underestimated. It's when a farmer is running the fans on a minimum ventilation setting, usually in the hours before sunrise, that levels will be at their highest. Few people will actually do their ammonia tests at that time.

Today, there are very good ammonia sensors available that continuously monitor the levels of the gas and can report it to a variety of devices, such as controllers or data collection devices like Intelia's Farm Data Management solutions. But producers balk at the high price of the sensor. However, as you will see in the example below, it only takes one high exposure event to provoke a loss in profitability that far exceeds the cost of the sensor.

There is nothing like a real-life case to clearly demonstrate the immediate impact of ammonia on body weight. The graph above is taken from Intelia's Compass software and it overlays the ammonia levels and average body weight, as registered in real time through the first 15 days of a production cycle. It compares two houses on the same farm, run by the same grower. Birds were placed at the same age and fed the same diet.

On the x axis, we see that at Day 4, when the bird scales were installed, the chicks in both houses had roughly the same weight (blue lines). But one house had rising ammonia levels (yellow lines), that no one noticed, while the other maintained its levels below 20 ppm. When the grower looked at Compass on Day 6, he quickly took action to bring it down, as can be seen on the graph. But the damage was done.

The impact on the bodyweight is very clear on the dashed blue line. Chicks suffered from the ammonia levels and despite them coming back to something similar to the other house, the weight loss was never recuperated over the full production cycle. The image above shows exactly that 0.5 lbs loss mentioned in the Watt newsletter (far right of the graph). That's the memory that was brought to my mind when I read the article. It's a coincidence that we arrive at the same amount of weight. Still, the weight difference was so great I still remembered it 2 years after the fact. This house also ended up having a lower livability and consequently higher feed conversion than the other house. For the same time and effort, the grower made significantly less revenue from that house than on the other houses. More than enough to afford the cost of the sensor AND the subscription to Compass for a full year!

Having access to the right information, in real time, leads to better decisions at the farm. There is so much to do in a day that it is easy to miss small opportunities for improvements. Each opportunity, when taken individually, may look insignificant but when you have a system in place capable of automatically identifying and bringing them to your attention, in a consistent manner, the savings start adding up.

Have you experienced the impacts of ammonia on bodyweight? How did you find out? What strategies do you put in place to minimize or prevent these events from happening? I look forward to reading you!

By: Caroline Forest