Gut health is important for poultry producers, not just for the health and performance of their flocks, but also from the standpoints of food safety and animal welfare – probably two of the most important issues for the animal agriculture industry as a whole.
I talked with Novus International poultry veterinarian Dr. Marco Quiroz about the importance of poultry producers having an overall program for gut health. “As veterinarians, we try to do preventive medicine in poultry, we work with best management practices in operations. We have very well established, well designed and uniform programs,” he told me.
He says they do what they call “flock physicals” to monitor the health status of birds. “It’s like a quality control of the health of the birds,” Marco says. “We check all ages of production to make sure all the birds are healthy, especially in the digestive tract.” Since gut health can be affected by any number of factors, from feed to environmental to water, a good program has to look at all aspects of an operation and of the birds themselves to maintain top performance.
Listen to or download my interview with Marco about gut health in poultry and how Novus helps provide producers with the tools to maintain it.
2010 International Poultry Expo photo album
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The president of the 
Apple just announced its newest creation – 
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The CEO of the Beef Board is Tom Ramey, seen here providing information to CBB Chairman Lucinda Williams at the Operating Committee Mtg. I spoke with him this morning about the issues and work being done here from the staff perspective.
Well, the International Poultry Expo has made things easy this year with an iPhone app. The IPE app is free and gives attendees access to all events and exhibitor information right on their iPhones. The app is available from Apple’s app store by searching for “IPE”. It’s a great way of using the latest technology in a very practical way and giving attendees a paper-free way to always know how to find exhibitors or where the next event is being held. Pretty cool! I expect we will be seeing that a lot more at conventions.
I spent the morning with the 
The Beef Board Operating Committee had a big challenge here at the Cattle Industry Convention. A number of previously funded projects returned unused dollars which now became available for re-allocation. This happens normally and so a number of what are called AR’s or Authorization Requests (amended) were made from other projects that had funds cut last year to obtain some of the newly available funds. As you might expect, there were requests for more than the dollars available.