Pr. Luiz Felipe CARON

The diversity of the intestinal microbiota of broilers in an industrial production system is affected even before hatching by environmental conditions that shape the intestinal integrity. Birth in clean and unchallenged environments makes initial colonization assume great importance in the first hours of life.

For this reason, ensuring optimal colonization and the physiological quality of this intestine generate a so-called superorganism, composed of microbiota and intestinal tissue. The microbiome, or the measurement of the ideal microbiota, is at the same time a consequence of these early life conditions and also the cause of the animal’s success in fulfilling its zootechnical potential and reacting to challenges. The cost involved in this reaction characterizes the sensitive balance between weight gain, feed conversion, slaughter condemnations and immune response.

In practice, it is as if the hierarchy of investments for the bird in terms of the energy needed to perform respected the hierarchy that management must observe, creating the ideal environmental conditions for breeding.

This means guaranteeing an adequate environment before hatching and especially after hatching, when contact with external challenges must occur in the best way, guaranteeing at least a gain of 5 grams per hour, and the necessary hygiene for production until slaughter. In this sense, Salmoella spp and E. coli can be used as process indicators, pointing to the quality of the adopted measures.

Productive processes, which involve the perfect environment, adequate nutrition, build a resilient microbiota from birth that, through field experiences, show that if the absence of Salmonella challenge is guaranteed up to 12 days of age, the animal has a great chance of reaching negative slaughter. In this way, what is guaranteed is that the breeding environment has the best dedicated processes from the beak outwards, and from the beak inwards the barriers characterized by the immune response, mitigate the challenges.

So the quality of the immune response relative to the cost involved in it, starts with an adequate inflammatory response, both constitutive and induced, and consequent adaptive response and resolution in the shortest time. In this way, better and better environments are built, internal and external, and the adoption of products at the right time can contribute to modern production demands with the rational use of antibiotic promoters and the adoption of alternatives that perform their potential, allowing the generation of a system sustainable. Which always had its origin in the investment in the breeding environment, at the same time as in proper nutrition, and adoption of appropriate tools seeking sensitive and useful biomarkers both in daily routine and scientifically.