Feed formulation Program for Instructing Poultry and Swine Nutrition Students.

Summary

We developed an Excel workbook that is used around the world to teach poultry and swine feed formulation to undergraduate students

Situation

Commercial Feed Formulation programs are very powerful, complex and difficult to learn. They are also expensive and several days of teaching students how to learn the program are needed before the students can solve even simple problems. More time is then needed before the principles of nutrition and the application of economic principles to feed formulation can be demonstrated. Commercial programs may be purchased for student laboratories, but then the students would have to purchase copies to take home and practice on their own computers. A feed formulation program we developed in the early 1990's does not work well with more modern printers and microcomputers. Most college students around the world now have microcomputers or access to them. Nearly all of these computers use the Windows operating system and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Most students are already familiar with Excel for tabulating data and making graphs.

Response

A Microsoft Excel-based workbook has been developed for teaching poultry and swine nutrition. The program consists of 11 individual spreadsheets and uses the Solver feature of Excel to find the least-cost solution to linear programming feed formulation problems. The program is available in Afrikaans, Albanian, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Turkish. The complete WUFFDA package consists of 3 files: The WUFFDA Excel workbook itself; a Microsoft PowerPoint file that can be used in lecture or auto-tutorial situations to teach the Excel program; and a Microsoft Word file that explains the Excel Program. All may be downloaded free from http://www.ces.uga.edu/ES-pubs/wuffda.htm. Problem size is limited to 25 ingredients and 34 nutrients. Several ingredient composition tables are included in the workbook, and new ingredients can easily be copied into the current, or active, problem. Nutrient specifications are included for broiler, laying and breeding chickens, turkeys, quail, ducks, guineas, goslings, and growing, gestating, and lactating swine.

Impact

Our WUFFDA program was tested in our Senior/Graduate level Monogastric Nutrition course for the past 3 years with excellent results. It is now being used around the world by the collaborators. We will have a poster presentation on WUFFDA at the International Poultry Scientific Forum in Atlanta in January 2003.

Details

• Year: 2009
• Geographic Scope: International
• County: Clarke
• Program Areas:
  • Agriculture & Natural Resources