INTRODUCTION
Poultry industry has groomed since the last decade and it would be growing further as the protein requirement would increase with the growing population. Poultry farming requires 
an investment of capital that diverges for buying of chicks, land, health and of course feeding. Feeding is the major aspect of poultry farming,contributing around 70% of the investment. Therefore, it becomes imperative to know ins and outs, of poultry feeding, as it becomes the major driver to extract the profitabilityout of poultry farming.
WHAT DRIVES THE PROFITABILITY OUT OF POULTRY NUTRITION?
Feed comprises mainly ofenergy, followed by that of protein sources. Due to high demand, fluctuation in climate, Prices of energy and protein ingredients tends to increase.
Following is the change in pattern of prices of prime raw materials
Limited number of suppliers, and variation in climate leads to less availability of raw materials andisaccompanied bytheir increase in prices. This shows that the prices are gradually increasing and would tend to increase further because of the limited resources.Hence,itleads to increase in investment and in turn decreases the profitability.
To maximize the profit, there is a need to combat the hike in prices.
SOLUTION TO CURB THE LOSSES DUE TO HIKE IN PRICES
To get the best out of anything, a way has to be generated. It becomes a mandate approach that a way is found which meets out the bird’s requirement as well as helps the farmer to get the profit as well.
Following are the two solutions:
Use of alternative feed ingredients
Feeding management using enzymes that helps in availability of protein and energy.
Use of Alternative Feed ingredients
Alternative feed ingredients for energy and protein are being used in order to decrease the complete reliance on Conventional energy and protein sources such as Maize and Soybean respectively.The cons that come with Alternative resources are its limitation to usage that is further divided into Nutritional and Technical aspects
Due to the above-mentioned nutritional and technical aspect, opting the second solution along becomes an indispensable approach.
Feeding management using enzymes that helps in availability of protein and energy.
Enzymes are biomolecule that catalyses a chemical reaction by interacting with a substrate and converting it into a product. Commercially enzymes that are being marketed for poultry feed are of two types-
Along with conventional, alternate sources of energy and protein contains residues. These residues trap valuable nutrients and are indigestible due to lack of endogenous enzymes
WHY MULTI-ENZYME?
Mono enzymes when added in the feed takes care of only one substrate at a time. There is only partial digestion of feed, the need for complete utilization of feed is unmet.
Poultry feed includes complex substrate that requires more than one enzyme activity for a complete solution. A customized blend of substrate specific enzymes has a greater potential to unlock these trapped nutrients such as Energy, Crude protein, Amino acid, Available Phosphorus.
Moreover, it takes care of the anti nutritional factors that would increases gut viscosity, impairs gut health and many more other problems that are associated with poultry feeding.
Multi enzyme preparation improves the nutritive value of ration that may complement the genetic exploitation of the poultry birds. It is important for the improvement in carcass quality, production efficiency and processing capacity of poultry products. Increase in body weight gain was also observed with administration of multi enzyme due to uniform availability of multi enzymes resulting in improved nutrient digestibility.Enzymes when added in combination, were observed to show a synergistic effect on growth performance. It is suggested that specifically both Xylanase and phytase potentiate eachother’s function. Xylanase releases the entrapped nutrients in the cell wall matrix and makes phytase accessible to its substrate that is Phytate. (Source– N.M. Gupta et al)
The addition of Phytase and a cocktail of enzyme improved the performance of chicken fed a corn- SBM based diet that was marginally deficient in energy and Phosphorus (Oluyinka A Olukosi et al-)
CONCLUSION
With increase in population, there will be increase in demand of protein and thus, poultry production will also increase. To drive the profit out of poultry production, complete reliance on the conventional raw material has to be dropped off. Alternate raw materials 
are definitely the solution, but to curb the nutrient losses due to the anti-nutritional factors present in those alternate raw materials, Enzyme usage becomes an indispensable step. Bigger picture is to see that complex feed material contains these complex substrates that if taken care by individual enzyme would not be economically feasible. Hence, here comes the multi enzyme system that synergistically handles the Anti nutritional factors and leads to out and out utilization of nutrients.
References are available upon request.
by Dr Pooja Rawal, Dr Amitabh Pandey, Optima Life Sciences
