Insights from Georgia's No. 1 agriculture industry: Poultry

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Emily Davenport: 0:01

Welcome to Cultivating Curiosity, where we get down and dirty with the experts on all the ways science and agriculture touch our lives from what we eat to how we live. I'm Emily Davenport.

Jordan Powers: 0:13

And I'm Jordan Powers, and we're from the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

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Jordan Powers: 0:21

We are here today talking with Todd Applegate, department head and R. Harold and Patsy Harrison chair in poultry science. Thanks for joining us today, Todd.

Todd Applegate: 0:29

Hey, thanks for having me.

Jordan Powers: 0:30

Why don't we kick off the show – I heard that you have a few poultry-related jokes in your back pocket. Can you share one or two?

Todd Applegate: 0:37

I do. I love chicken jokes. So why can you not have a football team all of chickens?

Emily Davenport: 0:43

Oh, I don't know. Why?

Todd Applegate: 0:46

There'd be too many fowls. So what is the chicken's least favorite day of the week?

Jordan Powers: 0:59

Okay, I'm sitting here going Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday...

Todd Applegate: 1:03

Friday!

Everyone: 1:06

[laughter]

Emily Davenport: 1:06

Womp womp.

Jordan Powers: 1:08

Sad day for the chicken

Emily Davenport: 1:12

Oh, man, I love it. All right. Well, besides telling jokes, can you tell us about a typical day in the poultry science department?

Todd Applegate: 1:19

The nature of our department, we're a very applied department. So meaning that while we do some fundamental long range research, most of the research questions that we have are, are very applied, meaning that they will approach immediate needs for our clientele. We're a very hands-on curriculum. So a lot of teaching labs going on with those students coming and going. We're very rich in terms of our outreach to the poultry industry, but then also with trying to recruit the next generation into agriculture as well. So we have a program with our Avian Ambassadors, which is those upperclassmen that we engage with different school systems throughout the state to let them know a little bit about opportunities within the poultry sector.

Jordan Powers: 2:14

So we kicked off the show with a little fried chicken joke, right. But poultry science is a whole lot more than just chickens being raised for meat, right? What else goes into a poultry science department?

Todd Applegate: 2:30

There's a lot so we celebrate that we are one of six poultry science departments left in the US which is also a little bit of a sad commentary. You know, from poultry, it is one of the the most consumed meats and proteins in the country, the average American consumes just at or under 100 pounds of chicken per year, which is a lot. The next closest is beef and pork, which are in the 50s per person. With that, though, we are everything you can think of that would go into producing a chicken, right? From engineering that goes into housing to provide the optimal environment for that chicken, to genetics of that chicken itself to nutrition and nutritional sciences behind what we're feeding and why we're feeding those chickens to health sciences and making sure that those birds are are healthy, to bird well-being making sure that we're raising them in a way and understanding the science behind well-being and the outcomes for that bird. To making sure that we're rearing them sustainably, you know, with minimal impact on the environment, but then also producing a safe product for our consumer.

Jordan Powers: 3:46

It's a lot to to wrangle into one department and the department's also more than chickens tell us what other poultry is involved.

Todd Applegate: 3:56

It is, right? So while we think of Georgia and the demographics within Georgia being predominantly broiler chickens, you know, chickens raised for meat, we are still fairly high in numbers of laying chickens, producing shell eggs that we consume to breeder birds, which are producing the next generation of chickens. But being one of six poultry science departments left in the US, we need to focus on making sure our students are exposed to issues with a range of the poultry sector. So turkeys, gamebirds, which we have one of the larger quail producers in the country located here in Georgia, to also one of my former research and Extension hats was that with the duck industry. Not so much duck industry here in Georgia, but there is much more in the Midwest.

Emily Davenport: 4:51

Well, with that being said, can you tell us more about your research with ducks?

Todd Applegate: 4:55

I started working with ducks back in the 90s when I was a graduate student. Most of my research back then was asking questions more, how the age of the hen influenced embryonic development, and then how we could get that young duckling off to a really good start. So that started my experience with duck research and it expanded more into duck nutrition. You know, providing an understanding better of what we know influences how that duck grows. The fun thing with duck nutrition is it is more so on composition, what you feed it, to what you get. So the fun thing is chefs really want different lean to fat ratios in a duck for different recipes and cuisines. And from a nutrition standpoint, I could do that and produce what that chef was wanting for specific recipes, which, which was very fun.

Jordan Powers: 5:52

That's fascinating.

Todd Applegate: 5:55

And it really tied together a lot of what we do in what we call live production and growing that bird all the way to that end consumer. So for me, it was very exciting.

Jordan Powers: 6:06

So speaking of partnering, you know, you were just talking about partnering with chefs. How are poultry science researchers partnering with other departments within CAES?

Todd Applegate: 6:15

And I might expand that question a little bit, to beyond CAES.

Jordan Powers: 6:18

Please do.

Todd Applegate: 6:18

But we're partnering with a lot of different departments, I'd say from our friends in the ALEC department specifically through ag education.

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Jordan Powers: 6:28

ALEC is the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication within CAES. ALEC promotes the study and practice of messaging, educational strategies, and personal leadership to influence societal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors about agricultural and environmental science.

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Todd Applegate: 6:46

One of our staff people and a couple of our faculty have worked closely on developing a poultry science curriculum that's just gotten approval in the last couple of years to offer a poultry science curriculum through high schools, which has been very exciting. We partner quite a bit with food science on new product development, as well as food safety trying to minimize incidents and persistence of salmonella and campylobacter.

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Emily Davenport: 7:10

Salmonella and campylobacter are two strains of bacteria that commonly infect poultry products and can cause people to get sick when they eat raw or undercooked poultry. If you're hungry for more food safety tidbits - whoa, sorry for that bad pun - we have a whole episode devoted to that, which we'll link in the show notes for you.

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Todd Applegate: 7:29

We partner with our friends over at Animal and Dairy Science on a number of different things from nutrition to genetics to microbiome research. And then beyond our college, we partner with the College of Engineering, Computer Science, those two specifically within our efforts as we expand into integrative and precision agriculture. But then also, we're not the only real poultry unit within the university because we have our sister center over in the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Poultry Diagnostic and Research Centers, so we collaborate quite a bit with them on all sorts of poultry health-related types of research.

Emily Davenport: 8:10

And to expand more on partnerships outside of the university, how do you partner with industry?

Todd Applegate: 8:16

So in partnering with our friends out in the poultry sector, there's a number of different things that we do directly with them. Due to the applied nature of the department, oftentimes, I'm a little bit of a matchmaker with companies with new technologies that are looking to launch or or have research within. But in terms of direct partnerships with the poultry sector, we do everything from trying to optimize housing environments for those birds. We're looking at welfare and welfare outcomes, how we assess poultry welfare. From food safety, we're looking at things not only in the processing facilities to minimize different foodborne pathogens like salmonella and campylobacter to trying to make sure we minimize those on the farms themselves, before those birds would go to processing. More recently, the last five to seven years, the poultry sector has shifted towards a large segment of that sector being reared without antibiotics. And that isn't without consequences. We want to make sure the health and safety of that bird is maintained. So we have a fairly large group in our department looking at how can we provide different strategies to maximize especially intestinal health in those birds without those antibiotics. So bird health is a big component to that. One of the ways we do so is looking at different feed additives that convey different health attributes probiotics, prebiotics, different medicinal plants and plant extracts, to development of new vaccines. As an example we have one faculty that's provided two nanoparticle vaccines, one against salmonella, one against another bacterial disease conveying a microorganism called Clostridium. We also have another faculty that's using CRISPR-CAS to try to develop a vaccine against a protozoal disease called Coccidiosis for the poultry sector.

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Emily Davenport: 10:26

CRISPR-CAS is a gene editing technique. We don't want to get too technical here. But the essential idea is that researchers take a little bit of DNA from a bacteria, the CRISPR part, and add an enzyme, the CAS part, and these two work together to very precisely snip out specific chunks of an organism's genes. We'll add a link in the show notes to this type of research if you're curious.

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Todd Applegate: 10:48

Our nutritional scientists are looking at ways as commodities are getting much more expensive. Typically about 70% of the cost of rearing a chicken is what the chicken eats. So we want to make sure that we can provide everything that that bird needs to be very productive, but doing so to try and minimize the cost ramifications so that we can pass on those cost benefits not only to the producer, but also to the consumer.

Jordan Powers: 11:14

This is why these conversations fascinate me, right? Like you don't, most people, I shouldn't say you because you probably think about this all the time. But most people when they go to the grocery store, or the farmers market, or wherever they're getting their chicken and eggs, they're not thinking about the insane amount of science that's going into making these products available. It's fascinating. But for those students who might be thinking about kind of following that track, and going into poultry science, what types of careers are awaiting them when they graduate?

Todd Applegate: 11:45

For our undergraduates? What I like to convey to those students thinking about those as well as their parents, is that it's more than what you probably see driving up and down the road in Georgia. Right? Most of our graduates, I would say are people and process managers. Right. So one of the things especially with our poultry science degree program, it is a blend of business, people management, as well as science. Our graduates are going directly to either poultry companies as managers in live production, the hatchery, the feed mills, the processing facilities, ensuring quality control and safety of those products. But then a lot of our graduates are also going into what we would call the allied or the supply sector. So they would go into sales, marketing positions, with different companies supplying products, whether that be everything from finance, credit to insurance to products that would be used within the sector, everywhere from packaging, to pharmaceuticals, to feed additives to equipments, you name it. There's quite a definite need across the breadth of that sector. The interesting thing about Georgia as well is because of the Savannah port, nearly 45% of the exports of poultry products through the US flow through the Savannah port. So if you can think of all the export-related businesses and supply chain that is related to maintaining a cold chain throughout where poultry is produced, getting it to the Savannah port, that's a lot of our graduates. Also the end customer and those big customers for poultry products, also are looking to hire our graduates as well. The quick serve restaurants, you know, the Zaxby's, Chick Fil A's, Cane's, that we all enjoy as consumers, they employ some of our poultry graduates to make sure that the product that they're getting from the companies producing chicken is meeting their their standards as that end customer. So quite a wealth of different opportunities for folks. That's just the undergraduates, not to mention the graduate students. And a number of our students will go on to graduate and professional school and for them, they are probably more specialized technical types of degrees working on what we think of from the supply chain as well from new pharmaceuticals, vaccines, health-related products, bird welfare, equipment, manufacturing, technical service, to a wealth of different customer bases. They would also be, say, the nutritionist or management specialists for the poultry companies, to also our regulatory and government friends as well. From FDA to USDA, especially trying to make sure that everything we're doing from that sector is also in balance.

Jordan Powers: 14:53

Again, just never... at any vocation you want to go into you can really apply chicken to it and make it your career. It's, it's amazing.

Emily Davenport: 15:01

It's amazing. Lots of opportunities.

Jordan Powers: 15:03

So you mentioned driving around on the road. I know that since moving to Georgia, I've seen a lot of chickens on the road in trucks in my role at CAES, I now know it has to do with Georgia's production levels. But why are so many in trucks? What needs to happen to get birds from, say, an egg to the grocery store?

Todd Applegate: 15:20

So one of the reasons that we have segmented part of our production really is specialization, right? So on the hen side, we want to make sure that we're providing the best environment for a hen to have her lay an egg, right, so she's producing the next generation. And really, that's a much different skill set and focus. We'll take that egg, we'll transport it to the hatchery. So we want to make sure that we're hatching those birds in the cleanest environment possible. And in doing so, in part of this segmentation, we've really reduced the risk to some degree of transport of disease, if they're on the same farm or same location, we have a higher incidence of that risk associated with the transport of disease. So that's part of the reason why we segment this. One of the interesting things going on kind of in that breeder to hatchery segment within the hatchery itself, we transport the egg from one where we incubate that egg, that egg needs to be rotated very frequently during the day so that the inner membrane doesn't stick to the inside of the shell, because that's really where that embryo was breathing is through that membrane on the inside of that shell. But then we transfer it from those incubators into what we call a hatching machine where that bird would actually hatch. Right, so we're going through a transport within the same building, typically, and then transporting that bird to the farm. One of the things, and this has been a trend in Belgium and the Netherlands specifically, is instead of transferring it from that incubator to the hatcher, that we provide that hatching environment for the egg on the farm itself. So that creates a number of different logistical challenges, right, because part of one of those additional things that bird is experiencing, once it hatches in the hatchery is we probably, is one point in time that it's receiving a number of vaccines to make sure it's protected for its journey into production. So we would have to provide those types of things on the farm itself. So, but it's one of those things I know we have one fairly sizable company with production here in Georgia that has the potential to look at that. As they're needing to remodel their hatchery, it's one of those things that they're considering right now.

Jordan Powers: 17:48

So once these products get to the grocery store, there are a lot of options to choose from, when we think about all these options, whether it's ready to eat, ready to cook, etc. What are some of the most challenging? And what about our audio editor's favorite, chicken nuggets?

Todd Applegate: 18:02

So I'll start at the beginning of the story, right? So it's interesting from the Food Safety Inspection Service, so that's an arm of USDA, and they're the inspection group within processing that's trying to make sure that the products coming out of those processing facilities are meeting the standards that we would come to expect to minimize risk on any sort of foodborne pathogen.

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Jordan Powers: 18:28

FSIS is the US Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, part of a science-based national system to ensure food safety. We'll link their website in the show notes for you.

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Todd Applegate: 18:40

What they do over time is they try and look at cases and incidents of foodborne illness. Our knowledge base on that end of the spectrum is growing, and how we identify and track back to different products has grown. But in doing so we've also tried to lower the thresholds of how much we will essentially tolerate from a regulatory perspective on incidents of salmonella and it's been mainly focused on salmonella as the primary foodborne pathogen in poultry and poultry products.

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Jordan Powers: 19:17

Emily wrote an article on the CAES Newswire last fall about how raising chicks on reused poultry litter can help reduce antibiotic-resistant salmonella. We'll link that article in the show notes for you.

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Todd Applegate: 19:28

So it's been lowering the threshold. A number of years ago, as an example, it had been if you were to look at like whole chicken and then you count numbers of chickens that are positive for salmonella, our benchmark threshold had been roughly I want to say 20% of those birds tested could have otherwise you would be going into a non compliance type of situation. We lowered that threshold to roughly around 8% a number of years ago and the other thing that was changed from the regulatory environment was, depending upon where you were testing, all of that information on a really good, meeting, or not so good, was put into the public domain at that point in time. So that was quite a critical change in the regulatory environment. But that's only been for salmonella. The other foodborne pathogen that we're really focused on and thinking about because its influence on human illness is Campylobacter. As we look at that, it also creates, you know, severe gastrointestinal issues, right. So we all want to make sure that we're not exposed to that. Right prior to COVID, FSIS was ready to release that regulatory threshold. They backed up a little bit, Campylobacter isn't as easy to track at least from, I'll get science geeky for a second sorry, on the plating environment, when you would plate it how you would enumerate for the presence of Campylobacter is much more difficult.

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Emily Davenport: 21:05

We love it when an expert goes full science geek on us. For those of you who are fuzzy on your laboratory techniques, the process of plating and enumerating is basically taking a little bit of bacteria and growing it in a petri dish that contains agar, which is food for bacteria, and then counting the number of bacterial groups or colonies that grow after you've plated them.

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Todd Applegate: 21:25

So they were trying to get to a consensus on how they were approaching that enumeration and then go back to trying to set what that threshold was from a regulatory environment. And then COVID came, right. And so that discourse on where incident to tying it with testing method was kind of disrupted and, and they just now are getting back to sorting that out. So that's the next one that's coming up. And that's just front end thresholds. So we, on different components and things coming from processing, we put different thresholds on salmonella and campylobacter, whether that be a whole chicken carcass might be one threshold, if we have parts and pieces like you're buying a tray pack from the grocery store might be a different threshold. And then as we moved into ready to cook or ready to eat products, we have much different tolerances for those levels of salmonella and campylobacter, right. So those are coming towards the you know, further on with him processing, we put in Critical Control Points to knock down and have interventions along the way to make sure that those products coming out have hit a threshold to reduce any incidence of that pathogen coming forward. So coming to chicken nuggets, that's a tough one, because that's towards the end of the line, so to speak, especially as you're ready to go to a ready to eat product. Right, you almost need zero incidents of any of those pathogens bring present. So that's a very tough threshold to achieve. But several companies are getting there, through different interventions. And the technology out there is really amazing, at least from thinking how we process things. And within the food processing sector, there's a number of different things, and advances in other products that now are maybe being tested and test driven into the poultry product world. One of those that one of our faculty is looking at is high pressure treatments come to find out it's really, really good at knocking down salmonella, just from a high pressure environment. Not so good on Campylobacter. So we're still trying to figure out those best intervention strategies. But it takes different intervention strategies at different points in time, testing, validation, you know, consistent testing to make sure that it's meeting the criteria that we're putting forth on expectation to hit and come below certain levels.

Emily Davenport: 24:02

Thanks so much for that great field trip into the world of food safety from the poultry perspective. Getting back to what's happening on campus, for our audience that doesn't know, there's a new poultry science building being built on campus right now. We're super excited about it and I know you're super excited about it, too. Can you tell us more about what this means for the poultry science students and faculty?

Todd Applegate: 24:21

So our current building is a 1958, 1959 building so it has a little bit of age to it. And because of the age, it lacks a little bit of the infrastructure. We've struggled I think in trying to remodel some of the spaces to make sure it has the electrical capacity, the HVAC components that we would need, but then also the the physical structure to do I'd say today's science. So from a research standpoint, we're very excited about what the new building will bring. It has six shared collaborative labs throughout the building, and a lot of the questions that we see on the research side by the poultry sector are beginning to be very complex questions. So providing an environment for teams and collaboration was first and foremost to make sure that we provide that environment so that we can foster those collaborations. But then also, we have some needs for specialized areas, right? So we're providing some new equipment into certain spaces. We have a new microscopy lab coming in that just to visualize some of those things that we see on impact, on tissues, and some of the disease and foodborne pathogens that we're working with, really will allow us to look into those spaces much more. We have some cell culture and microbiology spaces. We're always worried when we're doing those types of sciences of cross contamination, which, especially in old building HVAC is not the easiest to control. So having those spaces where we can really control those environments and, and really not be so worried about the cross contamination issues will provide a special place. One of the most unique spaces within the building on the research side is a food safety intervention space. There's not so many spaces out there, where you're looking at different processes or product interventions, to validate the reduction in certain foodborne pathogens, like salmonella, or Campylobacter. So we'll have a space and lab dedicated to the validation processes for those pathogens specifically. On the teaching side, we're so excited having gone through this process before, just to give you an idea, our current classrooms that we have, in our old building, have space, roughly about 17 square foot per student, going into the new building, based off of our university system guidance, it's more like 28 to 30 square foot per student. And what that additional space allows for is really creating a flexible environment where our faculty can incorporate more active learning components into their, their classes. So we're we're very excited about that. You know, this is coming in tandem with a big effort from UGA in active learning. So our faculty are really kind of abuzz with some of the discussion that's happening across campus. But then having those new flexible spaces, they're thinking about how to recraft some of those classes to incorporate, you know, how can we break apart the class into small groups to create and foster discussion components into the classes that we teach in those spaces. So there was a lot of forethought into just selection of where we were going to put this building. And that discussion has been ongoing probably well before I joined UGA, but I'd say for the last 10 to 15 years. And I think even though we're not moving that far from our current building, it is a much more pedestrian location. And for me, it's a wonderful location to think about what we can do within the space of the building to really foster and recruit students into agriculture and poultry science.

Emily Davenport: 28:17

I want to back up a step because you were talking about the HVAC system in the current building, not the new one. And just in thinking from like a science perspective and how it might contaminate experiments. Can you elaborate more on how that works for our audience who might not be familiar with things like that?

Todd Applegate: 28:33

Sure. So our building currently is three floors, and most of the offices are located on one half the building while our classrooms and laboratories are located on the other. About 20 years ago, they went to a centralized HVAC for the office portion of the building. The side that was not updated at that point in time is kind of a mixture of radiators, window AC units, a couple of split vent units. I always remember when I first moved to Georgia to take on this role. One of the microbiology labs that we had had a laminated sheet on loops over the window air conditioner that said "shut me off when you're doing any plating on the bench."

Jordan Powers: 29:20

Oh boy.

Everyone: 29:20

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Todd Applegate: 29:21

So as you can imagine, you have a middle of summer in Georgia trying to do a microbiology experiment, when you shut off the window AC unit is probably not the most comfortable.

Emily Davenport: 29:30

No.

Jordan Powers: 29:31

No, thank you. So we've talked a lot about the poultry industry in Georgia and specifically the impact here in Georgia. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that the poultry science is doing to make an impact both nationally and internationally?

Todd Applegate: 29:46

If we look at the breadth of our faculty, we have 21 faculty. Eight of those faculty have an outreach component and so there's a good critical mass of our Extension group that does a wealth of Extension programming for both the public events, I would say, and different workshops. We do a international workshop in January every single year. We'll get people from all over the globe coming to that. To very specialized types of conferences, breeder hatchery workshop, to one focusing on in preparing growers for the hot weather coming up in the summer. So they'll do a hot weather management course coming up in April. And then typically a cold weather management as growers are getting ready for preparing their houses for the cold weather coming up. So they'll do that in November. A lot of specialized types of workshops as well in food safety, HACCP, management processes, environmental planning, bird well-being, and so those are the, I'll say more public types of events. We also do some private ones as well for different poultry sectors in the supply sector, either for training for their own staff or for customers throughout the world. So we'll host a number of those throughout the year. So we're doing a number of different things for the poultry sector. Across things I've talked about already, you know, I think that some of the most exciting things come in terms of what we're doing, say on the health side and the bird well-being side, trying to look at new vaccines that were aiding in the health of that bird and the efficacy of what we're offering in terms of vaccines. Our friends over at the Poultry Diagnostic and Research Center focus on a lot of respiratory diseases, so they've learned a lot. One disease we face is infectious bronchitis, which also is a Coronavirus, just like COVID was, so we learned a lot from manufacturing of mRNA vaccines that hopefully can be applied to the poultry sector, just as an example. We're also, I'd say have a new group real focusing on the welfare and how we assess welfare. I think today's consumer is wanting to make sure a segment of that consumer is wanting to make sure that we're guaranteeing the welfare. So we're also looking at how we can automate some methods to ensure the well-being of that bird 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So some of those things are coming to play. But also, as we go into welfare sciences, somewhat of a new science, does not have the same length of history as some of our other disciplines. So there are a lot of questions that come about as we start digging into those welfare outcomes, right? So what is natural bird behavior? You know, how does that bird experience and express that it is in pain or distress? So trying to fundamentally understand some of those things, really feeds into not only that long term research, but then also some solutions that we can offer, in the more immediate term.

Emily Davenport: 33:11

In thinking about the welfare aspect, we know there's been some research using AI and how to help chickens be more comfortable in transport. Do you want to talk more about that?

Todd Applegate: 33:24

Most definitely, yeah. So a group of our faculty are currently looking at better assessing poultry transport in general. And this is always a difficult thing. Usually, most of our birds are loaded on trucks in the middle of the night when it might be somewhat cooler and then transported to processing. And that weather is going to change from overnight into the morning as the day heats up, especially in Georgia, in the summertime. We have a range of birds that we're rearing as well, anywhere from roughly a four pound bird up to nearly a 10 pound bird. And as you could imagine, a four pound bird might not put off as much heat as a 10 pound bird might. So those needs going into really the same types of coops on a truck. They experience that heat within that truck, maybe differently. So part of it is modeling the thermal mass of that chicken to try and make sure that we're predictive on time of day, temperature, relative humidity on how to maximize the welfare or well-being of what that bird will experience as it is being transported to processing. That's that's partly the modeling but there's several other places I think that we're excited about, in thinking about application of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the welfare space and what we're doing in poultry sciences. And that goes everywhere from better understanding and predictive of bird behavior, doing early indicators of maybe aggressive bird behaviors such as feather picking, birds tend to be a little bit cannibalistic in some senses, and we try to provide an environment that minimizes that type of behavior. But having early indicators of things that are not going right is key. We're also looking at other methods to maybe make sure that we're optimizing the environment within the house in a much different means to how we did it in the past.

Jordan Powers: 35:33

So we talked a lot about the work your department is doing on an international level, can you tell us a little bit about your international experience, specifically?

Todd Applegate: 35:41

I moved here from Purdue University in 2016. So before that, I was probably much more internationally engaged. Purdue had a wonderful environment and encouraged sabbatical, so I spent a full calendar year living in Vienna. At that stage, I wanted to shift a little bit of my research. Prior to that I had been looking at nutritional means to lessen the impact on the environment of what was coming out of poultry houses, either through manure or through the air. And the funding, at least for that type of work and in that era was was waning. And I knew at least from what was happening in Europe, there was a trend towards raising birds without antibiotics. So the time I spent in Austria, it was in partnership with a company on the R&D side of how they were developing products to go into that space. So part of it for me was really to garner additional perspective on pipeline of how industry was approaching research in that area. It's a wonderful experience, it's shifted part of my research interests and focus when I came back, and then since then, as well, has focused much more on that interface of disease and animal health and how we can provide nutritional and diet solutions to those problems. But internationally, I've always tried to build partnerships throughout the world. More recently, that probably has been in South America as well as with Asia. So I've had quite a partnership with Sichuan Ag University in Chengdu, China. And that partly was spawned through my duck interest, and duck research in the past. I also had a student who I got to know her parents very well, who were both were on faculty at that university and built those collaborations not only through the student, but then with with the parents as well. So it's always fun to get to know, parents of students and what they're doing halfway across the world. So that's been a fun experience. Brazil has been another focus over the past few years. We've had quite a pipeline of students not only from Brazil, but then also more recently from Colombia as well. So fostering those collaborations and relationships with institutions as well as with industry.

Jordan Powers: 38:04

Wow, I feel like we could have a whole separate conversation on every single thing you just said.

Emily Davenport: 38:10

Definitely. I'm going to take a sharp U-turn back to something that you said because it my brain went, what? When you talked about environmental pollution from poultry houses, not just in manure, but from the air. How does that work?

Todd Applegate: 38:25

I started on faculty back in 2000. At that time, a lot of the regulatory environment was going much more towards enforcement of the Clean Water Act. So it was more towards how we can reduce phosphorus specifically in entering into waste streams. So from a nutritional standpoint, it was trying to minimize the phosphorus output. If we think about how manure is applied to crops as a fertilizer. Typically manure is a one to one ratio in chickens of nitrogen to phosphorus. But yet the plant's needs are very, very different in terms of what that ratio might be in terms of nitrogen to phosphorus.

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Emily Davenport: 39:06

Like Todd said, plants don't really want a one to one ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus. Take a look at any fertilizer box. And you'll see that the ideal ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus for plants varies depending on the kind of plant you're growing. For example, some flowering plants like a ratio of three to one, or three parts nitrogen to one part phosphorus.

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Todd Applegate: 39:28

So if we're applying based off of nitrogen needs to the plant, we might be over applying phosphorus two to three times where that crop would take up in terms of nutrient. So if we're going by that ratio on how much manure we can apply to fields, we might be only applying on a phosphorus basis, a third of what we had been applying based off of a nitrogen basis, or needing three times as much ground to apply manure onto to lessen that environmental impact. So strategies we were trying to look at in that era were trying to lessen the amount of phosphorus to change that ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus, so that we could get back to minimize that transport issue on how much acreage was needed for those crops, but still minimizing the potential eutrophication or water impact that we might be having. So that was at that era. And then the regulatory environment came much more towards focus on air, specifically on ammonia and criteria pollutants such as VOCs, and greenhouse gases. So that became more reporting requirements under the federal Clean Air Act.

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Emily Davenport: 40:45

VOCs stand for volatile organic carbons, and they're released as gases from solids or liquids, like chicken poop. Some can have harmful health impacts. We'll add a link in the show notes where you can learn more.

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Todd Applegate: 40:58

And so we were looking at just setting a baseline for our understanding of different managements and different diets as to what that output actually was for those particular pollutants. So as the regulatory environment moved, we had a better handle on what those management strategies and diets were in terms of reducing or curbing different emmittance, the funding started drying up. So the interesting thing for me and partly the exciting thing is now that companies in the poultry sector, in several sectors, are looking to enhance their sustainability footprints, as we have different investment groups putting pressure on making sure that companies have a sustainability plan. So this is coming a little bit full circle for me in my career, at least on, if not necessarily having a regulatory component to wanting to reduce the environmental footprint, but rather, it's been more in consumer and investment driven on having a reduction and focus on that sustainability footprint. So the conversation has changed a little bit, but I think strategies are still fairly similar, although they've really broadened now as we think about sustainability, not only encompassing the environmental piece to that, but on also including some of the bird welfare and social component to that need for research.

Jordan Powers: 42:26

You have opened my eyes to so many more things about this, this industry and about poultry science. We've talked about chicken manure, we've talked about environmental impact, about poultry welfare, we've told some chicken jokes. But I want to ask, what's the weirdest question that you have been asked at a dinner party or another event when you tell someone what it is you do? Someone not in the industry.

Todd Applegate: 42:52

So I think probably the weirdest one is probably more some of the myths and misconceptions that come up in dinner conversations. So as an example, probably 70 to 80% of the consumers think we inject hormones into chickens to get them to grow faster, which that is such a myth and misconception that it is natural selection, right? So there's a reason why the Chihuahua is smaller than the Great Dane. It's all because of genetic selection. We do the same thing for chickens. And it's really their growth potential for those particular breeds or strains of chickens on why they grow so fast. So that's just one example. There's been several myths and misconceptions about within the last six months as an example why egg prices have been so expensive. I think the average consumer doesn't realize that most of that was because of impacts of avian influenza. And to get those farms back to housing birds, we need to make sure that they are cleaned, disinfected, but it really takes six to eight months from hatching a fertile egg to growing the parent to actually begin to producing an egg. So there's quite a time lag to repopulate all of those farms safely to make sure that they're not being reinfected with avian influenza to get eggs back on the market. So we're we've really come back a little bit on the numbers of hens out there in the marketplace. But that's been been one interesting one in particular, that's come up in conversation. So oftentimes, it is the myths and misconceptions that come up in conversation.

Jordan Powers: 44:32

Todd Applegate, mythbuster.

Emily Davenport: 44:35

New career move.

Jordan Powers: 44:37

I want to go back to the natural selection conversation for a moment. Give us some context, our audience can wrap their brains around. For example, if a human baby grew as fast as a chick, what would that look like?

Todd Applegate: 44:47

So let's talk about the chicken first, right, so starting out life probably 40 to 45 grams. Depending upon which market segment you're targeting, let's say it's a tray pack bird of six to seven pounds. Let's say it's six weeks of age, right? So that's nearly a 71 fold increase in body weight in six weeks. So if you're a person, right, so you were maybe eight pounds at birth. Wow, eight times 71. That's 568 pound in a short amount of time.

Emily Davenport: 45:30

Wow, that's a big baby.

Todd Applegate: 45:32

That's a big baby.

Everyone: 45:32

[laughter]

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[music]

Emily Davenport: 45:35

Thanks for listening to Cultivating Curiosity, a podcast produced by the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A special thanks to Mason McClintock for our music and sound effects. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.