Toronto, Canada – As global demand for poultry meat continues to rise, producers face increasing pressure to improve productivity while reducing environmental impact. At the 27th World’s Poultry Congress (WPC 2026), aviNews International spoke with Dr. Steve Lerner, Senior Scientific and Business Advisor for North America at Novonesis, about how biological efficiency, feed innovation, and data-driven technologies are reshaping the future of poultry production.
Feed Efficiency Remains the Industry’s Greatest Opportunity
When we look at the cost of poultry production, and the need to produce more protein from poultry, the focus turns to feed. “Feed is 70% of the cost in dollars, and 70% of the environmental impact”, says Lerner. As a result, improving how birds utilize nutrients, from driving feed efficiency, to improving rates of gain and reducing mortality, offers one of the greatest opportunities towards saving on feed and the impact on the environment.
Solutions such as feed enzymes, probiotics, and other biological additives can improve nutrient availability and digestive efficiency, reducing waste while supporting flock health and performance.
“The more nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen that you keep in the body of the bird, the less of that goes back out into the environment as nitrogen waste or as methane or as another pollutant that you’re trying to reduce. And you reduce the carbon intensity of the operation by improving feed efficiency,” he explained. That goes full stop towards sustainability.
The Evolution of the Scientific Perception of Poultry
Reflecting on several decades in animal science, Dr. Lerner describes that the scientific understanding of poultry production has evolved significantly. Rather than viewing birds simply as animals that consume feed and produce meat or eggs, researchers increasingly recognize them as highly complex biological systems, where nutrition, the intestinal microbiome, metabolism, immunity, and physiology interact continuously. This shift has transformed the industry’s approach to nutrition.
While antibiotics once dominated strategies for improving performance, advances in enzyme technology, probiotics, postbiotics, and functional proteins have enabled producers to support digestive health through biological mechanisms rather than relying solely on disease control. Understanding these biological interactions allows nutritionists to design feeding programs that improve nutrient utilization while supporting bird health and welfare.
Small Improvements Can Create Large Global Impacts
Very modest improvements in biological efficiency can produce substantial environmental benefits when applied across the global poultry industry. Using global feed production estimates as an example, Dr. Lerner notes that improving feed efficiency by just 0.25% could save millions of metric tons of feed annually while reducing land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and demand for natural resources. “Efficiency is the link between sustainability and profitability”, says Lerner. The gains achieved through modern feed additives and nutritional technologies often exceed these modest improvements several times over, illustrating the cumulative value of incremental progress. Rather than requiring dramatic changes, sustainability often results from numerous small improvements implemented consistently throughout the production system.
Data as a Critical Decision-Making Tool
As innovation continues to accelerate, producers obtain an expanding range of nutritional technologies and feed additives. According to Dr. Lerner, distinguishing meaningful innovations from products that simply add cost requires robust scientific evidence and practical field validation.
Companies should provide transparent research demonstrating measurable improvements in parameters such as feed conversion, growth rate, livability, and flock uniformity under both experimental and commercial conditions. Increasingly, digital technologies are making these evaluations more precise. Artificial intelligence, life cycle assessment tools, and digital dashboards now allow nutritionists and feed manufacturers to quantify how specific nutritional decisions affect environmental indicators such as phosphorus utilization, carbon emissions, land use, and water consumption. These tools enable producers to evaluate not only biological performance but also the sustainability outcomes associated with different feeding strategies.
The Future Lies in Biological Consortia and Precision Nutrition
Looking ahead, the concept of biological consortium takes an important aspect of animal production. The future nutritional innovations will increasingly combine multiple complementary technologies. Rather than relying on individual enzymes or single microbial strains, researchers are developing biological consortia that integrate enzymes, probiotics, postbiotics, and other functional ingredients to optimize digestive function and overall bird physiology. This systems-based approach recognizes that gut health influences not only nutrient digestion but also immune function, behavior, stress response, and animal welfare. Emerging technologies such as gene editing may further expand these possibilities by improving crop characteristics, optimizing beneficial microorganisms, and enhancing biological efficiency throughout the food production chain.
Sustainability through Efficiency
Throughout the discussion, Dr. Lerner focuses on a central theme: sustainability is ultimately achieved by improving efficiency.
As global poultry production continues to expand to meet growing demand for high-quality animal protein, producers will need technologies that allow them to produce more using fewer natural resources. By combining advances in nutritional science, microbiome research, biological feed additives, artificial intelligence, and precision data analysis, the poultry industry is steadily moving toward production systems that are simultaneously more productive, more profitable, and more environmentally responsible.
For Dr. Lerner, the future of poultry production will not be defined by a single breakthrough, but by the continuous fine-tuning of biological systems – small improvements that, collectively, deliver significant gains in efficiency and sustainability.