Propionic Acid Is An Alternative To Antibiotics In Poultry Diet

Abstract

Propionic acid (PA) is a fungicide and bactericide, registered to control fungi and bacteria in stored grains, hay, grain storage areas, poultry litter, and drinking water for livestock and poultry. European Union (EU) certifies PA as the great of grain preserver and most efficient in controlling Salmonella and other pathogens. Recently it is used as feed additive in poultry and non-ruminant production. Suitable inclusion level of PA is 0.2 to 0.4% which can improve the overall performances of poultry. The preservative effect of PA is due to its antibacterial and mould inhibitory effect. High bacteriostatic property of PA is due to its pH reduction activity both in feed and gastrointestinal tract through pharmacogenic action on microflora. Propionic acidA with its growth promoting, health enhancing and antimicrobial effect has proven to be an effective alternative to antibiotic growth promoters in food animal production.

Effects of organic acids on the gut ecosystem and on the performance of broiler chickens

“…That is in contrast with the findings of Adil et al (2010) who claimed that addition of 3% lactic, fumaric or butyric acid improved performance more than 2% inclusion levels. When compared with avilamycin or bacitracin, addition of 0.5% citric acid and 2% organic acid blend respectively were found more efficient, suggesting an excellent candidate for total replacement of AGps (Chowdhury et al, 2009;Samanta et al, 2010). On the contrary, in an experiment under commercial conditions, inclusion of flavomycin in broilers caused greater FCr reduction than a mixture of formic, propionic acid, their ammonium salts, essential oils and plant extracts.…”

“…However, despite the fact that the organic acids spectrum has been widely studied for bacteria and some pathogenic fungi and yeast like Aspergillus spp. and Candida albicans respectively (Haque et al, 2009;Samanta et al, 2010), there is no available data for the effect of organic acids on poultry pathogenic protozoa like Eimeria spp., Cryptosporidium spp. and Histomonas meleagridis.…”

“…Though, formic acid has been reported to have a broader antibacterial spectrum (partanen and Mroz, 1999;Haque et al, 2009). These differences are the reason why blends of organic acids are most commonly used in poultry feed.…”

“…T he removal of antibiotic growth promoters (AGps) from poultry diets in the countries of the European union in 2006 has led the researchers to reconsider the complexity of the gut ecosystem and the need to clarify the continuous interaction among the feed ingredients, the host and the intestinal microbiota, as well as to find alternatives to AGps (Chowdhury et al, 2009;Houshmand et al, 2011). Among the candidate alternatives widely studied are the organic acids.…”

Effect of Organic Acid Salts as an Alternative to Antibiotic Growth Promoters on the Production Performance of Commercial Broiler Chicken

“…Acidification increases gastric proteolysis, protein and amino acid digestibility and utilization of minerals and thus improving the performance of the birds (Haque et al, 2009). Organic acids (propionic acid and butyric acid) effectively replace the antibiotics and improve the production performance like body weight gain and FCR (Vijayalakshmi et al, 2015;Adil et al, 2011;Deepa et al, 2016).…”