Informal nutrition symposium: critical update on net energy research and implementation status in poultry

The supply of dietary energy is of critical importance to all animals and is of large economic impact for the poultry industry. Over time, livestock nutritionists have refined the measurement of dietary energy, and the expression of energy requirements from digestible energy (DE), to metabolizable energy (ME), and ultimately to net energy (NE), subdivided into NE for maintenance and NE for production. Commercial dairy, beef, and swine nutritionists have largely moved to expressing energy in terms of NE, but the poultry industry has not been as quick to make the transition from ME. The symposium papers explore the benefits and limitations in the use of NE for broilers, strengths and limitations of various sources of feedstuff energy values, the partitioning of dietary energy into retained energy and heat production, and the utilization of synthetic amino acids for energy by the bird.