Poultry News & Events

Dr. Anup Johny will lead a online course titled, Backyard Chickens: Science and Practice during the spring 2019 semester. Backyard Chickens - Science and Practice is an online course designed to meet the needs of students interested in understanding chickens in general, and for those who engage or are planning to engage in small scale farming of chickens. This course, expanded over 6 modules; (1) Basic biology and behavior (2) Selection (3) Housing (4) Nutrition (5) Management and (6) Diseases as it relates to chickens, will help the students understand the basic science of rearing chickens. Each of the six modules encompasses pertinent short video or PowerPoint lectures that provide fundamental and applied information on backyard chicken rearing. Students will also be introduced to public health, environmental and societal impacts of urban chicken raising. This course is an undergraduate level course and will run January 22 - May 6, 2019.    Dr. Johny invites anyone interested

By Tim Johnson  Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Editor's note:  This is part 3 of a 3-part series written for Gobbles, the official publication of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association.  It is being published here prior to printing of Gobbles because of the current events involving Salmonella in the poultry industries. Salmonella is on everyone’s mind, with recent declared outbreaks by the CDC of Salmonella Reading in turkeys and Salmonella Infantis in chickens. It can be a bit perplexing for the producer to understand why the ecology of Salmonella changes so dramatically, when nothing has changed from a management perspective. In order to understand what might have changed, we first have to consider basic Salmonella ecology and how it impacts into our understanding of what has happened. 1. Salmonella can change very quickly through gene transfer. What is the fastest way for Salmonella populations to change? The answer lies in its genome. Salmonella, li

By Abby Neu, Extension Educator – Poultry, Carol Cardona, Extension specialist, poultry virologist and Sally Noll, Extension poultry scientist November 1, 2018 Through diligent surveillance, two Minnesota turkey farms have detected low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI). Minnesota has been influenza-free for the last 42 months. These incidents should make every poultry employee, manager and owner step-back and think about possible complacency in their biosecurity practices. An influenza virus needs a host in order to grow and Minnesota has plenty of hosts to offer within our poultry industry and thriving waterfowl habitats. Clinical symptoms for LPAI are minimal with no physical symptoms while some birds may exhibit respiratory distress. The particular strain of influenza currently present is H5N2. An H5 virus has potential to mutate into a more serious strain of the virus. This can happen because the virus becomes stronger with each new host (individual bird), and it takes a les