Efficiency in feeding has been the major concern in raising poultry, as nutrition and feeding cost 65 to 75% cost of production. It has also been the major means of manipulating poultry production system for profitability. Poultry being the direct competitor of human being for available feed resources warrants judicious use of feeds and their intrinsic factors. Moreover, with the growing concern of the present society on the environment and animal welfare, the attention of the nutritionists has also been diverted towards management of stress, augmenting immunity and minimizing wastage of nutrients that adds to environmental pollution. To overcome those constraints in the process of making poultry farming a sustainable enterprise, considerable amount of research is being done in the area of poultry nutrition. Areas that have had received attention during the last three decades include optimization of nutrient requirements of different classes and age groups of poultry, partitioning of the requirements, understanding interactions of nutrients and effect of dietary variables, to find out alternative feed resources and their evaluation for efficient utilization in poultry rations, devising suitable processing methods for improving the nutritional value of non-conventional poultry feeds, to find out the effects of exogenous toxins in feeds (like mycotoxins) and to develop suitable methods for their detoxification to improve the utilization of nutrients and safeguard bird’s health. However, an overview of the research work undertaken on important aspects of poultry nutrition during the last ten years has been presented in this article.
