Nutrient requirements of poultry publication: History and need for an update

The NRC Nutrient Requirements of Poultry has been a benchmark publication for the research, judicial, and regulatory communities domestically and abroad since the first published edition in 1944. The poultry scientific community has looked to this publication for benchmark diet formulation. With extraordinary changes in growth and productive potential of modern poultry strains, as well as changes to body composition and egg output, it follows that nutrient needs have changed beyond what the bird can compensate for with increasing intake per unit of BW. Research publications used for amino acid and phosphorus recommendations in the last NRC are now, at best, from 1991 and at worst from 1947. To our collective credit, the poultry science community has published substantial amounts of data in those areas to warrant an update to the ninth revised edition of the NRC Nutrient Requirements of Poultry. Historically, our perception and definition of a nutrient requirement has changed from first being a requirement, as a percent of a diet, to preventing a nutrient deficiency, to now being a requirement to optimize growth or egg production response per unit of nutrient intake. As economics becomes an increasingly more important driver for the implications of research, the scientific community has begun to embrace the concept of return on investment of nutrient used for compositional growth or egg production. As these concepts take shape, the current edition's format will have to undergo a substantial creative revision; possibly even embracing the concept of modeling of nutrient responses. Funding for such a revision will require a large financial investment from the NRC, the feed industry, commodity associations, as well as time investment by the scientific community.