Evaluation of Enzyme Feed Additive on Ammonia Emission from Broilers

Dietary manipulation has proven to be a cost-effective method to mitigate NH3 emission and improve environmental quality of poultry housing. It has a number of advantages, including reduced nitrogen input into the system, increased nitrogen in the manure, reduced ventilation air requirement to dilute the indoor ammonia concentration and thus saving energy, and reduced need to further treat the exhaust air. Enzyme feed additives had been used to improve gut health and production performance. Akaline phosphatase (AP) was assessed for ammonia emission reduction and manure properties. The results of the lab and field studies showed that adding alkaline phosphatase (AP) in broiler feed resulted lower NH3 emissions from younger broilers. There was no significant difference on manure production rate and moisture content between the control and AP diets. The AP diet reduced manure pH (P=0.05) at 22-d and lowered phosphorus by 6 and 7% at 14- and 22-d (P=0.02). There was a trend that AP diet could reduce NH3-N and TKN in the manure. NH3 emission from fresh manure over a 4-d period with AP diet was significantly reduced by 23.8% at 14-d, 30.7% at 22-d, and 5.9% at 30-d birds. The efficacy of NH3 emission reduction by the AP diet under the field condition was age-dependent during the 38-d growout period. The NH3 emission was significantly reduced by 19% at 27-d of age and 10% at 31-d of age. The overall NH3 emission reduction rates for the 38-d period were 4.7%.