Challenges in Conducting Commercial Scale Poultry Production Research: Sussex County Delaware.

Chicken production is important to Delaware. The 918 poultry farms in Delaware produced over 246 million chickens in 2007; ranking Sussex County the number one producer among all United States counties (USDA, 2009). The two major contributors to the $1 billion 2007 agricultural receipts, were poultry and grain production. Approximately 76% of Delaware's cash farm income was from broilers in 2006. With a land mass of only 1,954 square miles, Delaware averages about 126 thousand chickens per square mile. Each year, there are 288 chickens produced for each person in Delaware.

In 2002, the University of Delaware and the Jones-Hamilton Company began a cooperative venture to address broiler producer’s questions and address their concerns. Because broiler production is essentially a chick-brooding operation, the houses’ contain equipment to control feed supply, light levels, and air temperature and moisture (regardless of outside conditions). Adequate water quality and availability is also an essential component for optimum broiler performance since a chick's body contains approximately 80 percent water at hatching. The last, and perhaps most important issue, is air quality; particularly ammonia (NH3) emissions. Ammonia plays an important role in both bird health and the formation of fine particles in the atmosphere. However, as Fowler et. al (2006) stated “Controlling emissions of NH3 from agriculture is notoriously difficult, as it combines an inadequately know science covering a very disparate range of activities in a complex industry with social and political issues.”

University of Delaware and Jones-Hamilton built a state-of-art broiler house to evaluate all aspects of poultry production. This house is 40-by-112 feet and divided in to two equal halves to provide identical spaces for comparative research. All inputs are precisely recorded and air quality, in terms of carbon dioxide and NH3, are recorded each half hour.