Wine Waste: The New Superfood - for Chickens
Whether drinking wine is good or bad for our health is a continual debate.
But what about the waste created by making wine? We know that wine waste, also called pomace, can be used to make healthier chocolate, and that wine wastewater can be converted into drinking water.
Now we’ve learned that wine waste, the leftover grape skins, seeds, stems, and peels, is the new superfood – for chickens. It can keep chickens healthy, eliminating the need to feed them antibiotics.
Inflammation is common in broiler chickens. It sickens the birds and hinders their growth. Farmers add antibiotics to their feed to fight inflammation and keep them healthy.
A new study conducted by Cornell University found that adding just a half percent (0.5%) of wine waste to broiler chickens’ feed can nearly match the performance of zinc bacitracin, one of the most widely used antibiotics in the poultry industry. The wine waste, rich in fiber and antioxidants, improved the chickens’ weight gain, feed efficiency, and gut health. Both fermented and non-fermented pomace mitigated the adverse effects of inflammation. Wine waste also provided the added benefit of prebiotics, important for gut health.
The researchers called the results “striking.”
The researchers noted that further studies were needed to “confirm the mechanisms underlying the microbiome, gut health, and performance responses…in chickens.”
The study, entitled Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways, was recently published in Nature.
What Does This Research Mean for Us?
These findings are good news for chickens, but more significantly, they may have an important impact on human health. It’s long been a concern that the overprescribing of antibiotics is leading to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, also called “superbugs.”
This overuse makes antibiotics less effective. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria make it harder to treat bacterial infections and ultimately weaken our immunity, both individually and from a public health standpoint.
But the truth is that more than 70% of the antibiotics sold in the United States are given to farm animals. Moreover, the use of antibiotics in farm animals has jumped in the past few years, leading to an increase of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals.
So we’re not only exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria if our doctors overprescribe antibiotics, but we’re also ingesting antibiotic-resistant bacteria from the food we eat and the milk we drink. It can infect a person with the same resistant bacteria that were in the animal.
And we can’t avoid it by being vegan or vegetarian. Superbugs from animals can infect humans in other ways, such as by using manure as fertilizer. The drug-resistant bacteria can then end up in our fruits and vegetables through the soil.
The problem has become so acute that many chicken producers will no longer accept chickens that have been fed antibiotics. The European Union, China, and Brazil have already banned the use of antibiotics in chicken feed.
The industry has been searching for non-antibiotic alternatives to keep chickens healthy. So this research is particularly promising.
Using wine waste would also help wineries and the environment, as the wineries would be able to repurpose and sell or donate their wine waste, rather than sending it to landfills.
The research is still in the early stages and raises several questions. They include:
· Antibiotics are commonly used to feed other farm animals, including cattle and pigs. Can wine waste be used to keep other animals healthy?
· The study noted that grape pomace is a natural, low-cost alternative to antibiotics. Would this be cheaper for chicken farmers, and if so, would that make chicken more affordable?
· How significantly can this change in chickens’ diet improve public health?
So whatever one’s views on the benefits of wine itself, it looks like wine waste can make the world a better place. Not bad for a waste product!
We hope this info on wine waste, the new superfood for chickens, gives you some food for thought.
What other problems could wine waste potentially solve? What would you like it to solve? Join the conversation! We’re at info@winewithourfamily.com. As always, feel free to reach out to us with any questions or feedback.
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