Reliable poultry records key to sound decisions

In Kenya today, about 78 million broilers are slaughtered annually.

About six million birds are lost through poor management, malnourishment, disease, and sheer neglect. The main three challenges facing the chicken farming industry are a high cost of production, poor bio-security and welfare and dwindling markets for the meat and by-products.

Smart farming

It is generally agreed that to help farmers reduce these losses, one must concentrate on improving on flock performance, widen monitoring of poultry health and welfare, improve on chick environment and housing, give balanced diet and feed for lifetime performance and ensure your flocks are in a bio-secure environment. To achieve these parameters, farmers must have tools to help them generate enough data and statistics for making instant informed production decisions. This is what I call Smart farming.

Changing preferences

The consumers are constantly changing their preferences for what they want to eat and where to eat, the choice for antibiotic-free reared chickens etc. This change means that our farmers must adopt the use of technology, sensors, metering equipment, battery-powered devices to precisely grow birds efficiently, without the use of antibiotics and achieve good feed conversion ratios of 1.5-1.6 in 33 days, mortality of three per cent, average daily gain in weights of 50g per day and performance indicator factor of 300.

It’s imperative that farmers work closely with their chick suppliers to understand the most recent requirements of the progeny flocks and know the inherent genetic potential of these breeds in detail. A farmer must also know the offspring expected growth profile, feed requirement, and housing preferences at the time of purchase of day-old chicks. Chicks must be transported to the sheds in conducive vehicles with temperature monitors.

At placement, farmers should have thermometers to record chick vent and floor temperatures, gadgets to measure humidity and levels of carbon dioxide. There is a correlation between the brooding temperatures and the weight gain and that flocks that are reared on cold environments tend to do poorly compared to warmer environments. These hand-held devices are mainly battery operated and are now available in the market, they empower farmers to precisely know instantly what is going on in the poultry house and based on these concrete data, then they can swiftly change the environment for the better performance.

Cleaning and disinfection levels can also be monitored indirectly by doing what is called gut health scoring for coccidia lesions.

Nutritional performance 

Nutritional performance is generally monitored using weight platforms placed in the units or a sample of five per cent chicks manually weighed on day 1, day 7, day 14, day 21 thereafter every day till slaughter and a graph plotted against expected weight profile. Birds that do not achieve target day 7 weights (160-180g) will struggle in life to perform excellently. These weight data can be used to create a uniformity graph with a coefficient of variation, a COV of 6-8 per cent would be considered a good weight spread. Most farmers would go for cheap feed however as you know cheap can be expensive as well, I would prefer a low-cost feed that would give you best performance, but you spend less. If all factors remain constant, a good well-balanced feed should give you 1kg of meat on 1.6-1.7 kg of feed fed. All feed must be measured and allocated in grams per bird per day, this must be calculated weekly and based on the expected growth profile supplied by the chick producer. If it cannot be measured, it cannot be monitored.

 Water consumption

The other factor that needs measuring is water consumption. Birds generally will drink twice as much as feed consumed. In a tropical climate like ours, a day-old chick will consume on average 70mls of water per day, this rate will gradually increase as the bird grows normally. Water consumption rate should be measured by installing a water meter. A drop-in water consumption is the first indicator of a problem in a flock and requires immediate investigation. An extremely hot environment can also result in high water consumption, if you deny water to the birds, there will be a corresponding drop in weight gain.

Other parameters that need measuring include carbon dioxide, ammonia and airflow rates. We must use all technologies at our disposal to accurately relate predictive information that we gather to data-driven improvements.

We must endeavor to know at any moment all that is happening at the poultry unit instantly with a surgeon’s knife precision, only then can we be confident with our informed production decision.

[The writer is a vet at Kenchic.]