Better food for chickens 🐔⠀
After six months of shutdown, the Canadian Light Source was back in action for February! I got to meet this lovely scientist and share about his work… before I go off on parental leave until the new year.
University of Saskatchewan Ph.D. student Yousef Khanfas’s work focuses on how to improve feed processing for poultry nutrition. Hard wheat has higher starch digestibility compared to soft wheat in broiler chickens, but soft wheat is common in human diets. What isn't used for humans gets diverted to feed, so maximizing the nutrition available from both is important. ⠀
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In Canada, both soft and hard wheat are processed the same way for feeding poultry, but they have different characteristics (ex. protein & starch ratios), which affects how they grind up and could affect how well chickens can digest the wheat. Yousef uses the CLS to understand the differences between soft and hard wheat in terms of matrix structure (starch/protein and fibre). ⠀
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