Connie Mou

Recently a study was conducted on commercial broiler farms examining broiler water usage over the first seven days of a growout. High-accuracy, ultrasonic water meters were installed in twenty-two broiler houses (18, 40' X 500' houses, four 54' X 500' houses) on nine farms. The water meters were capable of accurately measuring water flow rates as low as 0.005 gals/min, which is 50 ...

Getting chicks off to a good start is very important to overall flock performance. At no time does a bird grow faster than during the first week of its life. Over the last week of a 42-day-old flock, a bird’s weight will increase by approximately a third. In contrast, a chick’s weight will typically increase approximately four fold, possibly more, by the time it reaches seven days of a ...

Something to consider. If we preheated and ventilated a house long enough prior to chick arrival, the need for a litter treatment would be drastically reduced, if not possibly eliminated. Litter treatments are used primarily because the cost of preheating and ventilating a house long enough prior to chick arrival to remove excess moisture and ammonia produced by the previous flock far exceeds that ...

The level of ammonia young chicks will be exposed to during the first week of their lives is determined to a large extent by what was done to the litter between the flocks. Towards the end of a flock, the birds are adding thousands of gallons of water to a house each day. During cold weather, reduced ventilation rates, in an attempt to keep heating costs to a minimum, can result in a large percent ...

Windrowing has become a very popular method of managing litter between flocks. In order to get the most benefit out of windrowing, the litter needs to be relatively damp. How damp? Ideally, the litter moisture content would be between 25 and 35%. At this level of litter moisture, when you grab a handful of litter and squeeze it, it would form a very tight ball. Most research has found a litter moi ...

INTRODUCTIONIn poultry, phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient in metabolic processes and a component of nucleic acids, membrane phospholipids, and bones (Nie et al., 2013). Much effort has been made to increase P absorption in poultry to improve metabolic performance and reduce the environmental impact of phosphate (Pi) release from manure (Ahmadi and Rodehutscord, 2012; L
etourneau-Montminy et ...

It may be difficult to comprehend, but water actually doesn’t “flow” in drinker lines...it slowly drifts. In a way it is more appropriate to consider the flow of water in drinker lines as a pond more than as a rushing river. This holds true for a house with day-old birds or even market-age birds.Drinker line flow rates are fairly easy to calculate. For instance, a flock of 50-day ...

High ammonia affects broilers in many ways. Research has shown that ammonia concentrations as low as 25 ppm can reduce bird weights at 28 days of age by two to seven percent while 50 ppm ammonia has been shown to reduce bird weights from 16 and 19 percent (F.N. Reece et. al., 1980, D.M. Miles, et. al., 2004). Ammonia exposure has also been shown to reduce feed conversion by approximately one point ...