Commercial Poultry Nutrition 3rd Edition by S. Leeson and JD Summers

This is the golden standard of poultry nutrition textbooks. Did I say golden? I meant platinum, or whatever the highest ranking in precious metals is.

This is how textbooks need to be; straight to the point, not verbose, and filled with critical, necessary, and useful information.

After chapter one Leeson and Summers don’t opt for wordy introductions on topics they’re about to discuss, something I’m failing to do with this review.

The book breaks down most if not all of the ingredients one can think of in terms of ingredients for feed.

Every ingredient has a summary in the end with clearly defined “Potential Problems” and an analysis table — this serves as a great reference tool for a guideline on what to expect real-life analysis figures should come to.

They also point out all of the necessary formulation constraints and they mention keynotes on Quality Assurance for storing ingredients in bulk form — this is crucial for real-world applications.

Leeson and Summers address everything from additives to mycotoxins and they provide sample feeding programs for every bird. The book is ‘chicken’ heavy, and that is obviously to be expected. If you work with chicken this is a fountain of information.

Given the market for water-fowl and game, birds are considerably smaller, the amount of content from the book devoted to this is also considerably smaller.

Bear in mind that these types of textbooks are relatively dated given how fast breeders develop their stocks and their respective needs, and your breeder will have the most relevant information in terms of nutritional needs.

That being said, this book has very sound knowledge and very interesting tidbits from ongoing research peppered throughout it. Will this book be the end all be all of poultry nutrition textbooks? Probably not.

Is it a fantastic start to build a sound foundation? Absolutely! PS, the appendix is a really easy nutrition summary if you don’t want to search for each ingredient’s section.