This month the Poultry Hub team attended IPPE in Atlanta, USA. It was amazing to see the endless displays of poultry related tech and gadgets. The meeting is huge with over 30,000 attendees. It takes the better part of three days just to get around all the displays! We found the robotics and processing equipment particularly interesting. I even found an updated version of the chicken counter my father invented back in the 80’s! We spent time chatting to many of the companies that already supply the Australian industry in some way, swapping stories and discussing their plans for the future. We also had a chance to meet with companies who have not yet entered the Australian market. This gave us an opportunity to discuss the benefits of the Australian industry, such as our strong and cost-effective poultry research and the fact that we do not face any international competition due to importation. We also discussed some of the challenges of our industry, such as quarantine restrictions. Overall, this experience was insightful, daunting and thought provoking.
While at this meeting PHA ran two workshops. These workshops were facilitated by Associate Professor Tamsyn Crowley, Dr Amy Moss and Professor Gene Pesti. Predominately based on the book ‘Nutrition Experiments in Pigs and Poultry’ these workshops ran for 2 hours and attracted an additional fee, we were very pleased with the level of interest. The first workshop covered feed formulation, giving participants important background but also an opportunity to do hands on exercises. The participants learnt how to formulate and balance diets and were provided with the skills and Excel workbooks enabling them to formulate the least cost feed formulations. The second workshop concentrated on the importance of experimental power. Participants were taught the essentials of appropriate experimental design, understanding replication and randomisation, the impact of variation and how to control it and finally how to calculate experimental power. This workshop was a mix of theory and practical hands on activities. The overall feedback from both training sessions was overwhelmingly positive with 95% of participants satisfied with the training. PHA has plans to facilitate more of these workshops in the future and will be running them as online modules, with the option to obtain partial University credit for each module. If you are interested and would like to know more or to join our training mail list please contact poultryhub@une.edu.au.
