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'Chicken Challenge' sends students on original quest

October 27, 2006

ChickChallenge.thmb.JPGThe opposing teams in the inaugural State of Origin Chicken Challenge met this week for the culmination of a hard-fought contest that – in the end – resulted in a draw.

But when the NSW “coach”, Ian Godwin, said his team-members “really got up and ran with it”, he wasn’t talking about a football. He was talking about a scientific quest: the search for an ideally cost-effective chicken feed.

Dr Godwin and his team of students from The University of New England (UNE) challenged a team from the University of Queensland (UQ) to come up with feed formulations that would be more cost-effective than those the UNE team could devise. Using their nutritional skills and computer software, each of the teams formulated three diets from the same list of ingredients. All six diets were then secretly manufactured and coded.

Unaware of which feeds were which, each of the teams tested all six of them in simultaneous trials over two weeks. (The chickens in both groups of 140 were all from the same hatching, and delivered to UQ and UNE on the same day.) The Challenge came to a head last Monday, when the 30-member UNE team travelled to UQ’s Gatton campus to compare results and find out whose diets had been more successful.

“It was so close we were almost into extra time,” said Dr Godwin. “But, in the end, everyone was happy with the tied result. And all the students’ formulas did better than the commercial feed used as a control."

The Chicken Challenge was supported by a Teaching Development Grant from UNE. Dr Godwin, a Senior Lecturer in UNE’s School of Rural Science and Agriculture, explained that the Challenge had “capitalised on students’ enjoyment of competition in helping them to gain a better understanding of feed formulation concepts”.

“In combined workshops at Gatton this week,” he continued, “the students examined all the variables – including environmental factors – that could have contributed to their results.”

The trials had been conducted with scientific rigour, he said, and the results were worthy of being written up as a paper to be presented at a scientific conference. “We plan to do that next year. In this way, the students will have a peer-reviewed paper to their credit before they graduate.

“Those of them who, after graduation, go into research or industry as nutritionists, will hit the ground running as a result of what they’ve learnt through the Chicken Challenge and related programs.”

The Chicken Challenge has been incorporated into nutrition courses at UNE and will be an annual event. The course coordinator, Professor John Nolan, said: “Students are gaining important nutritional skills with a practical knowledge of the chicken industry, and are combining their learning with some friendly inter-State rivalry.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed here shows UNE team members Belinda McGilchrist, Tarsha Macklinshaw and Daniel Ham in training for the Challenge.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at October 27, 2006 12:46 PM