Poultry News

Poultry News

News of the now, strange, fun, and all things poultry.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

By Kenny Coogan and Carla Tilghman

Duck Changes One Man’s Life

“The first thing that I missed when I became homeless was having a pet,” Dave Hughes told NPR news. Hughes had become depressed and unhoused at the beginning of the pandemic. After being robbed twice and threatened multiple times he found a community under a bridge crossing Brush Creek in Kansas City.

A Muscovy duck amongst a sea of Canada geese stood out to him. And the duck, who soon was named Ahmed, started visiting him under the bridge. Hughes arranged a small house for her using donated clothes and other items he came across. Ahmed arranged a few items and moved in.

Hughes calls that winter, spring, and summer he spent with Ahmed “the golden age of homelessness.” After relocating to a more stable place to live, Hughes would still return to visit Ahmed daily. He would collect and eat her eggs and spend hours visiting with her.

On March 9, 2022 Hughes could not find Ahmed. He searched the creek and nearby ponds daily, but Ahmed was never found.

“Ahmed gave me this gift of seeing what birds do, what their whole gig is,” Hughes told NPR news. “But there’s this entire world, love, death, reproduction, everything going on, all around you. And you don’t really realize it until you just kind of stop and look at it.”

Hughes is now a devoted birder at Brush Creek.

System turns chicken litter into a stable fertilizer, captures methane, and recycles water

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station researchers have assembled a prototype system that could help alleviate the issue of excess nutrient runoff in watersheds from poultry litter. Jun Zhu, director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Sustainability, says it is the first of its kind in the United States.  Historically, ways to treat poultry litter have not been economically or environmentally friendly. This system uses anaerobic digestion whose methane could be used for heating and cooking fuel.

Another benefit of anaerobic digestion is that it removes nuisance odors. The biological stable product, called struvite, is considered an eco-friendly fertilizer because only a small percentage is water soluble and it releases its nutrients slowly.

NutraMaize receives $650,000 USDA grant to darken egg yolk color

The goal of the Phase II project, titled “Nutritionally Enhanced Orange Corn: A Natural Domestic Source of Antioxidant Carotenoids for Improved Poultry and Consumer Well-Being,” is to demonstrate the health and pigmentation benefits of feeding orange corn to poultry on a commercial scale. In Phase I they showed that the health benefits of carotenoids included “reducing the incidence and severity of footpad dermatitis, a common health problem for poultry, and significantly enhance the depth of color and health-benefiting antioxidant carotenoid content in egg yolks,” NutraMaize CEO Evan Rocheford said.

“We are particularly interested in working with organic egg producers since they have limited options for disease management and typically spend significantly more on expensive carotenoid supplements to ensure their yolks reach the dark color expected by their customers,” Rocheford said.

The company’s antioxidant-rich orange corn is currently available to Americans through its line of premium milled products marketed under the brand Professor Torbert’s Orange Corn, which is a non-GMO product that has a distinctive nutty, buttery characteristic.

Fighting a cold? Try A Chicken Soup Martini?!

In the 50s Campbell led a campaign for Soup on the Rocks! Today Jazzton Rodriguez from Very Good Drinks! has created a chicken soup martini. You may have come across his other drinks, named brothtails on social media.

For Mirepoix Gin:

• 30 grams carrot
• 30 grams onion
• 30 grams celery
• 10 grams EVOO (@getgraza )
• 8 ounces gin (we used @fourpillarsgin Olive Leaf Gin)

For Chicken Bouillon ‘Brine’:

• ½ tablespoon Roasted Chicken Base (we used @betterthanbouillon )
• 4 ounces or 120ml hot water
• Big pinch kosher salt (about 3g)
• Pinch of MSG (about 0.75g)

For Saline Solution:

• Dissolve 20 grams kosher salt into 100 grams or 100 millilitres water

For the Drink:

• 2 ounces Mirepoix gin
• ½ ounce Manzanilla sherry
• ¼ ounce Chicken Bouillon Brine
• 2 to 4 drops saline solution (to taste)
Garnish with carrot ribbon and extra virgin olive oil.

U.S. begins testing bird flu vaccines for poultry

AFTER THE NATION’S WORST AVIAN FLU outbreak, with more than 58 million poultry and waterfowl dying in the U.S. and hundreds of millions of
birds dying around the globe, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is testing four vaccines against the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). The USDA says if the trials are successful and if they decide to continue development, it will take at least 18 to 24 months for a vaccine
that matches the current virus to be commercially available.

A 13-year-old girl solved her town’s duck overpopulation problem

Eighth-grader Renee Tucker was assigned a public speaking project. She addressed the overpopulation of ducks and geese at the local pond but then followed through on her speech and solved her town’s problem!

At the Virginia pond in addition to migratory birds, people had been dropping off domestic geese and ducks. With so many birds in one location the feces was overwhelming the pond and the birds were venturing and soiling the school’s practice field. Renee, with her father, Brian Tucker, spoke in front of the town council meeting. With a background in poultry they offered to remove the domestic birds, since it is illegal to capture and relocate wild migratory birds. Using a corral system they were able to capture 20 geese and a dozen domesticated birds and rehome them.

RESOURCES
• https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173247386/how-a-wayward-duckchangeda-kansas-city-homeless-mans-life
• https://www.uaex.uada.edu/media-resources/news/2023/april/04-28-2023-ark-poultrylitter-digester-update.aspx
• https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2023/Q1/nutramaize-receives-
650,000-usda-grant-to-scaleresearch-on-orange-corn-thatimproves-poultry-health-andegg-yolk-pigmentation.html
• https://verygooddrinks.co/chicken-soup-martini/
• https://kansasreflector.com/2023/05/12/the-u-s-isundergoing-its-worst-bird-fluoutbreak-ever-is-a-poultryvaccine-the-answer/
• https://cardinalnews.org/2023/05/02/a-13-year-oldgirl-solved-her-towns-duckoverpopulation-problem/



Originally Published in the Aug/Sep issue of Backyard Poultry magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.

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