Soybean meal is the major and preferred source of protein for all types of poultry, due to the amount and quality of its protein and amino acids. A diet based on maize and soybean meal provides a good balance of all essential amino-acids except methionine, but this problem can be solved by the inclusion of synthetic methionine (Waldroup et al., 2008). Soybean meal inclusion levels range from 25% in chicks to 30-40% in broilers, breeders and laying hens (Willis, 2003; McDonald et al., 2002; Ewing, 1997).
Pre-extraction treatments have shown to be effective in improving soybean meal nutritive value.
Dehulling
It was shown that the dehulling of soy beans prior to making conventional soybean meal had positive effects on layers who produced significantly bigger eggs with stronger eggshell when they were fed on dehulled soybean meal (Park et al., 2002). Broilers fed on dehulled soybean meal also linearly increased their body weight gain with the provision of soybean meal in their diet and their gain per feed ratio was higher (Park et al., 2002).
Recently, it was shown that dehulling soybeans prior to Extrusion-Pressing or prior to Flaking-Cooking-Pressing had no effect on starter broilers (1-14d) and growing broilers (14-28d) for feed intake (FI), average daily gain (ADG) and the feed: gain ratio (FCR) (Royer et al., 2020). Dehulling had only significant advantage on carcass yield, possibly resulting from adaptive growth of gizzard and proventriculus (Royer et al., 2020).
Heat treatments
Heating soybeans prior to oil extraction or heating soybean meal is very important as heat can destroy heat labile antinutritional factors present in soybean seeds. Heat has also some effects on protein solubility of soybean meal, which is important for its nutritive value. It has been demonstrated that autoclaving raw hexane-extracted soybeans or soybean meal increased the growth of broilers fed on this raw material by 140 to 150% (Dozier et al., 2011). Cooking, autoclaving and microwaving were referred to as the most successful heat procedures that may have an important role in removing ANFs in peas (Habiba, 2002). In soybean, heat procedures like extrusion, cooking, toasting and roasting have been reported to be efficient in reducing trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA) and phytic acid (PA) in soybeans (Ari et al., 2012).
In broiler chicken, feeding heat-processed soybean meal yielded higher final body weight and higher BWG and the broilers had lower feed: gain ratio compared with broiler fed on raw soybean meal. However, no differences were found among heating procedures (autoclaving, roasting and microwaving) on growth performance of animals for the starter, grower and finisher periods (Tousi-Mojarrad et al., 2014).
On the contrary, overheating has deleterious effect on soybean meal nutritive value and it has been recommended not to overheat soybean meal.
Nevertheless, the method, and the combination of time and temperature need to be optimized since under-heating results in poor destruction of ANFs while over-heating causes unavailability of some amino acids. It has been suggested that the digestibility and availability of essential amino acids are increased when autoclaving occurs at 121°C further than 20 min, causing higher growth performance of broiler chickens thaks to higher destruction of ANFs by the heat treatment, while the excessive hot processing when SBM was autoclaved at 121°C for 40 min decreased digestibility and availability of lysine and cystine (Parsons et al., 1991) and resulted in lower growth performanceof broiler chickens (Tousi-Mojarrad et al., 2014: Anderson-Hafermann et al., 1992). An other study suggested that over-heating occurred beoyond 10 minutes of autoclaving: subsequently soybean meal nutritive value was impaired (Araba et al., 1990).
In the USA, approximately 66% of protein in broiler feeds comes from soybean meal (Dozier et al., 2011). The reference soybean meal used in poultry feeding in the world is the solvent-extracted soybean meal.
However, the recent development of organic poultry production led to alternative processes like extrusion-pression (expelling) and more energetic soybean meal.
Extrusion can be done at different temperatures and it was shown that at the lowest temperatures (121 and 135°C) the resulting soybean meal could be considered underprocessed, with high urease activity and low amino acid digestibilities in roosters. It was then suggested to extrude soybeans at temperatures higher than 135°C and no over processing was noted at 160°C (Karr-Lilienthal et al., 2006).
Amino acid true digestibilities of expeller-extruded soybean meal were lower than those of solvent-extracted soybean meal referred to in the NRC. However, it was found that broilers fed on such expeller-extruded soybean meal had no difference in growth performance over a 49-day period but chicken had lower breast meat yield (24.95 vs. 26.30%) (Powell et al., 2011). A further experiment reported that CP ileal digestibility and amino acids ileal digestibility of extruded soybean meal was higher that those of solvent extracted soybean meal. Daily weight gains and feed intakes were increased and FCR was improved by the use of extruded soybean meal which was thus considered valuable for poultry feeding (Jahanian et al., 2016).
Other plant protein sources can partially and totally replace soybean meal in poultry rations, such as cottonseed meal, groundnut meal, sunflower meal and palm kernel meal, provided that they are used in combination with lysine supplementation. However, antinutritional factors and other potential issues may limit the use of these alternative protein sources (Elkin, 2002).