Poultry health management has long relied on a familiar playbook:
when disease strikes or routine monitoring calls for it, we collect individual samples—blood draws, cloacal swabs, tissue samples—and run targeted diagnostic tests. While these methods remain the gold standard for confirming specific pathogens, they come with significant limitations. Traditional sampling is labor-intensive, often requires culling birds, and typically represents only a small fraction of the flock. The result? We're often flying blind between sampling events, catching problems only after they've taken hold or missing subclinical issues that could impact performance.
Environmental sampling, for example via boot sock swabs, offers a less invasive alternative to traditional sampling and represents the entire flock. This method is already employed for things like Salmonella Enteritidis monitoring, in combination with focused cultivation of specific targets. But it remains underutilized and still leaves gaps in our understanding of the dynamic microbial landscape within barns.
Barnwell is pioneering a fundamentally different approach that maximizes the potential of environmental sampling. Drawing inspiration from COVID-19 wastewater epidemiology—where sewage monitoring provided early outbreak warnings—we combine routine barn-level boot swab collection with comprehensive metagenomic sequencing to create an ongoing window into flock health.
Metagenomic sequencing has the power to detect the entire ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites that influence flock health. While that amount of data might sound overwhelming, our team specializes in translating complex signals into actionable insights. That means this comprehensive approach to ongoing surveillance can enable what matters most, like earlier detection of emerging pathogens, monitoring of antimicrobial resistance patterns, and tracking of beneficial microbes that support gut health and performance.
Rather than replacing traditional diagnostics, this approach creates a complementary layer of intelligence that helps you make more informed decisions about when and where to deploy targeted testing. By shifting from reactive problem-solving to proactive population monitoring, producers and veterinarians can move beyond "wait and see" to predictive flock health management, catching problems before they become costly while optimizing health strategies based on real-time microbial insights.
