A 19-week production-cycle study examining chromium propionate supplementation in tom turkeys appears in Poultry Science, Volume 105, Issue 12, with a December 2026 publication date. The paper reports two endpoints turkey producers track closely: bird performance and removal rates over the grow-out period.

The research team — Brooke A. Wilson, Brett C. Ramirez, Mary Sue Mayes, Karen Vignale, Jerry W. Spears and Dawn A. Koltes — designed the work to follow toms through a complete cycle rather than a truncated grower phase, which is where much of the existing chromium literature stops.

What did the study measure?

The investigators followed tom turkeys across the full 19-week production cycle, recording performance parameters and removal rates, the two figures that most directly shape flock economics in commercial turkey barns. The title of the paper — "Impacts of chromium propionate on Tom Turkey performance and removal rates during a 19-week production cycle" — states the scope plainly.

Chromium propionate holds a distinct regulatory position among trace-mineral supplements in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine has permitted chromium propionate as a supplemental source of chromium in swine and, in later rulemaking, in cattle diets. Turkey producers reading this paper will want to check the exact regulatory status for poultry use against the source text before drawing feeding-program conclusions, because the article itself is the authoritative record of what the authors tested and found.

Why does a full-cycle design matter?

Trace-mineral research in poultry often reports grower-phase weights and feed conversion, then extrapolates. A 19-week design that carries toms to market age captures what happens late in the cycle, when metabolic load peaks, lameness and skeletal culls concentrate, and removal decisions accumulate into meaningful percentages of the flock.

Removal rate, as an endpoint, sits at the intersection of animal welfare auditing, processing-plant economics and barn-level labor. A supplement that shifts that number even modestly across thousands of birds changes the math on a placement.

The author list signals a multidisciplinary effort. Ramirez and Koltes bring environmental and physiological expertise from a land-grant animal-science program; Spears has published extensively on trace-mineral metabolism, including chromium; Vignale's work covers trace minerals in poultry. Mayes rounds out the team with production-system experience.

What should practitioners take from it?

For poultry veterinarians and nutritionists, the study offers cycle-length data on a supplement whose approval pathway in food animals already runs through FDA CVM. For companion-animal practice, the findings carry no direct implication; this is a food-animal feeding study, and extrapolation across species would be unsupported.

On the public-health side, trace-mineral supplementation at approved inclusion rates falls under existing feed-regulation frameworks rather than residue-monitoring programs, but any on-label use question should be verified against current FDA CVM policy.

The paper, published December 2026 in Poultry Science, Volume 105, Issue 12, now enters a literature where cycle-length turkey data remains scarce, and subsequent flocks will test whether its results hold at commercial scale.