Harnessing mushrooms for poultry nutrition: Boosting health, immunity, and productivity

Author: mycolabadmin
4/28/2025
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Summary

Mushrooms and mushroom stems are emerging as natural feed additives that can significantly improve poultry health, growth, and egg/meat quality while reducing the need for antibiotics. These fungi contain beneficial compounds that boost immune function, reduce harmful bacteria, and protect against cellular damage. By using mushroom byproducts that are typically discarded, farmers can create more sustainable and environmentally friendly poultry production systems while improving overall bird health and productivity.

Background

Edible and medicinal mushrooms are emerging as promising functional feed additives in poultry nutrition due to growing concerns about antibiotic resistance and demand for natural alternatives. Mushrooms are rich in bioactive compounds including β-glucans, glycoproteins, polyphenols, terpenoids, and antioxidants that exhibit multiple health-promoting properties. Mushroom stems, often discarded as waste, present a cost-effective and sustainable feed resource with significant nutritional value.

Objective

This review synthesizes current evidence on the application of mushrooms and their stems in poultry diets, emphasizing their nutritional roles, physiological impacts, and underlying mechanisms. The review examines how mushrooms can improve growth performance, feed conversion, immune function, and product quality while promoting sustainable poultry production and reducing antibiotic dependence.

Results

Evidence demonstrates that mushroom species including Pleurotus ostreatus, Agaricus bisporus, and Flammulina velutipes improve growth rates, feed conversion ratios, carcass traits, meat quality, and egg production in poultry. Mushrooms enhance antioxidant defenses, boost immune function through β-glucan activation of immune cells, improve gut microbial balance, and provide antimicrobial benefits. Mushroom stems provide comparable nutritional and functional benefits as caps while representing an underutilized agricultural byproduct.

Conclusion

Mushrooms represent a sustainable, natural alternative to synthetic growth promoters and antibiotics in poultry nutrition with demonstrated benefits for health, immunity, and productivity. Standardization of species selection, dosage levels, and feeding durations requires further research to optimize applications. Mushroom supplementation, particularly utilizing stem byproducts, offers a pathway to more resilient, environmentally responsible, and economically viable poultry production systems.

Published in:Poultry Science,
Study Type:Review,
Source: PMID: 40446686, PMC: PMC12166808, DOI: 10.1016/j.psj.2025.105223