"Sergio and Luca Capetta now vaccinate broilers to eliminate risks of drug residues."

When poultry producers Sergio and Luca Capetta decided in 2000 to begin using coccidiosis vaccine in their broiler flocks instead of infeed anticoccidials, they made that decision for number of reasons. But the most overriding one, they will tell you with devilish grins, was to stay out of jail.

The Capettas run Capetta Group, a feed mill and broiler/breeder operation in the Piemonte region of northern Italy. It’s an area of intensive food animal production and is very strictly monitored by state veterinarians.

Says Sergio Capetta, "In all of Holland there are just 400 (public) veterinarians, but in Italy we have 4,000. Here in Piemonte, for example, not a single bird goes to market without a veterinarian certifying its health."

Not only is the level of scrutiny high, but so are the penalties imposed when inspectors spot infractions. Fines can run as high as €100,000 and multiple infractions can even lead to imprisonment.

Prior to adding coccidiosis vaccine to their operations, the Capettas were using standard infeed anticoccidials to control the disease. That meant that when they switched from feeds containing medications to feeds without drugs, great care had to be taken to ensure bins and feed lines were cleaned before the non medicated feed came into contact with the equipment. This was a daunting task given the volume of feed the Capettas process: 200 metric tons per day.

"There are three risk points for possible contamination that we had to be concerned about—our feed mill, our trucks that transport our feed to our 70 farms, and the feed lines in the farms themselves," explains Sergio Capetta. "When switching from medicated feeds to withdrawal feeds, we had to spend a lot of time making sure every residue of the drug containing feed was gone."

But even with cleaning, the possibility of contamination didn't disappear.

"Some of the anticoccidials—especially nicarbazin—have a higher electrostatic charge than others," he says. That causes residues to cling to the insides of feed lines and bins and makes thorough purging of equipment very difficult.

So besides spending time cleaning equipment of residues, the Capetta brothers spent even more time worrying about whether their efforts would be enough.

And then there were the steep penalties. There were always the penalties to worry about.

Customer confidence at stake

After one brief but nonetheless costly shutdown of the mill due to a contamination issue, the Capettas made the decision to avoid further worry by switching to the coccidiosis vaccine, Paracox 5, which is sprayed onto day old chicks in the hatchery. Seven years have passed since they took that leap, but the Capettas certainly aren't looking back on that decision.

The cost savings, in terms of euros, hasn't been huge, Luca Capetta says. "The vaccine, of course, costs money."

But brother Luca points out that there has been a significant savings in labor costs of cleanings between changes of feed.

"We estimate that even avoiding one clean out each day we save at least 5% in production time," he says, adding that the actual savings could be much more. "Most days, when we were using the infeed medications, we had to clean the equipment several times."

Another advantage, Sergio says, is that using the vaccine instead of in-feed anticoccidials allows more flexibility in tailoring to the specific needs of each day.

"Every day is different," he says. For example, sometimes a farm decides at the last minute that it needs to add 5 extra tons of non medicated feed to their order.

"Before we started with the vaccine, if the truck we were sending had had a load with nicarbazin in one of its bins, we couldn't load the non-medicated feed into an adjacent bin on the truck," Sergio explains. "We couldn't take the chance of cross contamination. We had to send a separate truck."

But now, he says, making last-minute changes is much easier and safer because it only involves changing the tonnage, not the formulation. He also points out that using the vaccine eliminates the need for, transporting medicated feed back from the farms to the feed mill at the end production cycles.

Advantages shipping live birds

There is similar flexibility when Capetta sorts and markets live birds. “When we keep the medicated birds separate. It was a mess,” Sergio says.

The Capettas say that with the elimination of anticoccidials in their operation they do have to keep a closer eye on necrotic enteritis, which the anticoccidials helped control. However, the use of the vaccine has allowed them to become more flexible with feed management.

For example, they can now place more emphasis on using nutrition to help build immunity and promote better intestinal health, rather than work around the rotation schedules of the drugs. To complement this effort, they are also looking forward to trying a new vaccine for necrotic enteritis that is currently being used in the United States and is expected to be approved in the EU states over the next year.

Best of all," says Sergio, "it is good to be able to sleep soundly through the night and not to have to worry about a policeman knocking on my door!”

Spring 2008

Regresar a European Edition (#1)