Every year the College of Agriculture and Bioresources hosts an award celebration called Bean Feed. It is a wonderful night to celebrate student, faculty, and staff award recipients and to thank our many generous donors. This year 2 members of our team were nominated and chosen to receive awards. 

Karen received the AgBio Dean's Award for Research Excellence and Tory was awarded the AgBio Staff Excellence Award!

With so many wonderful faculty and staff in our College, it was truly an honour to be chosen to receive these awards! Our lab group had a wonderful time celebrating all of the night's recepients!

Today Samantha McPhee successfully defended her MSc thesis titled "The effect of LED light flicker on the welfare, health, and production of layer pullets reared to 16 weeks"

Sami has been an amazing member of our research team and we wish her all the best on her next adventure as a Poultry Specialist for New Life Mills in Clavet!

Today is our summer student's, Margaret Parsons, last day. Margaret is going into her 4th year of undergrad this fall and she has spent the summer watching behaviour videos for her 6 credit undergraduate thesis project. She has been a wonderful addition to our research team and we wish her all the best with her classes this fall!

Our team had a great time in Philadelphia for the Poultry Science Association's Annual Meeting July 10-13. The University of Saskatchewan had strong attendance with 10 individuals attending the meeting and a total of 10 oral presentations and 2 posters from research conducted at the Poultry Research and Teaching Unit. (Photos can be found at the bottom of this post)

Two members of our lab also received award at the meeting!

Tory Shynkaruk was awarded the Tyson Foods Inc. Support Personnel Award, which acknowledges the contributions by support personnel and recognizes outstanding support of research, extension, or teaching programs in poultry science.

Sameeha Jhetam received two awards! She was selected as the PSA Hatchery's Student of the Year and also received a Student Research Paper Certificate of Excellence in recognition of her high-quality research presentation at this year's meeting.

Karen was invited to present 4 talks this year, 2 symposium and 2 oral presentations.

"Reducing turkey stocking density to improve welfare - can there be unintended consequences?"

"Live transport of poultry - impacting the welfare and meat quality of birds"

"Light spectrum and commercial broiler welfare"

Listed below are the oral presentations given by members of our research team:

"Optimizing performance of heat stressed broilers through manipulation of dietary starch-to-lipid ratios, apparent metabolizable energy, and digestible amino acid content" - Dilshaan Duhra, PhD candidate

"The effects of transport box density on day-of-hatch leghorn chicks" - Sameeha Jhetam, PhD candidate

"The impact of light flicker and strain on aggressive behaviours, fear, and stress levels of table-egg production pullets reared to 16 weeks of age" - Samantha McPhee, MSc candidate

"Effects of LED light flicker on turkey hen performance to 11 weeks of age" - April Hammond, MSc candidate
 
"Measuring physical activity: Is a low-cost activity tacker suitable to determine physical activity in broilers?" - Dr. Carolin Adler, Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Denise Beaulieu also gave an oral presentation regarding work done at the Poultry Centre, which two of our students (Zoe Cloutier and Samantha McPhee) assisted with, "The interaction of dietary fat and ergot on broiler performance and ergot alkaloid disappearance".

Finally the two posters presented were as follows:

"Effects of LED light flicker on turkey hen health to 11 weeks of age" - April Hammond, MSc candidate

"The impact of light flicker and strain on production and health of table-egg production pullets reared to 16 weeks of age" - Samantha McPhee, MSc candidate

Dr. Carolin Adler presented a talk titled "How to maintain good air, litter quality and productivity in high density broiler houses" at the Decimoquinto Congreso Internacional AVEM 2023 meeting in Pachuca Mexico.  

We are happy to welcome two new lab members:

Zoe Cloutier is our newest MSc student, her project focuses on the impact of light colour on pullets. Zoe's birds arrived in May so she is busy working  on her first of two research trials.

Margaret Parsons is a third year Animal Bioscience student who is working on her 6 credit thesis with Karen. She will be spending her summer in our lab analyzing behaviour videos to determine the impact of rearing broilers with dual light intensity.

The 2022 World Poultry Congress was held in Paris, France from August 7-11. Karen, Carolin, Bruna, Jo Ann, and myself along with Tennille Knezacek from the UofS Poultry Extension Group attended.

Jo Ann and Bruna presented some of their research from their MSc and PhD projects and Karen gave a presentation on the International Poultry Welfare Alliance (https://www.poultrywelfare.org/). 

Lastly we are excited to announce that the location for the next WPC in 2026 will be Toronto!

Bruna successfully defended her PhD thesis “The Influence of Wavelength on Production, Behaviour, Health, and Welfare of Broiler Chickens” today! 

We are so proud to announce the Karen has been promoted from an Associate Professor to a full Professor, which is very well deserved. She is an amazing teacher/mentor, with an incredible work ethic, vast knowledge base, and wonderful attitude!