The potential to reduce poultry nitrogen emissions with dietary methionine or methionine analogues supplementation

Abstract

One of the environmental challenges that the poultry industry has been faced with is manure utilization or disposal. Poultry manure and its nitrogenous compounds can be a potential pollutant causing eutrophication, nitrate or nitrite contamination of water, ammonia volatilization, and acid deposition in the air. Therefore, reducing nitrogen excretion and emissions in poultry manure is important to maintain a clean environment. Proper nutrition is an important first step to optimize performance and growth in animals as well as to reduce the negative impacts on the environment. Amino acids are components of protein nutrition that greatly influence growth and one of the essential amino acids is methionine, which is often first limiting amino acid in high protein diets for poultry. However, excess or insufficient methionine supplementation into diets increases nitrogen excretion and emissions to the environment. One way to reduce nitrogen excretion and emissions is reducing crude protein level and supplementing analogues of amino acids to meet the amino acid requirements. Several analogue forms of methionine are commercially available as economic alternatives for the animals now. Supplementation of hydroxy analogues into low protein diets can minimize excess amino nitrogen in the diets and reduce nitrogen excretion. In order to use these dietary strategies effectively, a well-balanced feed formulation and a precise way of rapidly quantitating the bioavailable sulphur amino acid in feeds remains to be developed.