Assessment of the safety and quality of combined feed for poultry farms in Ukraine in 2023‒2025

In the context of developing market relations in the livestock sector of agricultural production, ensuring high productivity of animals and poultry and obtaining high-quality products at the lowest cost is the main task. Therefore, violations of feed safety and quality indicators and the search for ways to correct them are relevant. The aim of this study was therefore to identify violations of the most important safety and quality indicators for compound feed in Ukraine’s poultry industry between 2023 and 2025. To determine the degree of microfungal contamination, 47 samples of compound feed for agricultural poultry were tested. The results showed that 78.7% of the feed was substandard, while 21.3% was of good quality. The main contaminants in the feed were representatives of the genera Aspergillus (38.3%), Penicillium (16.4%), Fusarium (4.7%), and Mucoraceae (13.7%). Potentially toxin-producing taxa of the genus Aspergillus were represented by A. flavus, A. fumigatus, A. niger, A. glaucus, and A. oryzae; Penicillium — P. lanosum and P. commune; Fusarium — F. moniliforme; the family Mucoraceae — Mucor and Rhizopus, and the genus Trichothecium — T. roseum. Monitoring of the quality indicators of 58 feed samples revealed the following: in compound feeds, there was a decrease in crude protein content by an average of 16.3%, crude fiber content by 33.8%, crude fat content by 15.6%, total calcium concentration by 13.3%, and inorganic phosphorus by 13.4%; in concentrated feed, there was a decrease in crude protein content by an average of 7.0% and an increase in crude fiber content by 11.3%. These results suggest that the sanitary conditions of the feed for agricultural poultry are unsatisfactory, which is probably due to non-compliance with processing regimes for compound feed components and the consequences of military operations in Ukraine