Chick length and Organ development

Do you continued this research until the chicks were procesed at the slaughter house? If yes, I would like to get the information about body weight, feed conversión, carcass quality, etc.

Dear Mister,

Your question was how you can produce longer chicks. First of all there are a lot of factors influencing chick length and therefore chick quality. Two of them are breeder strain and age of the breeder flock.

Another factor influencing chick length is the incubation process, which needs to fit to the requirements of the embryo. Our recommendation is to incubate chicken embryos at an eggshell temperature of 37.8ºC (=100F). The eggshell temperature differs from the environmental temperature in the incubator. The environmental temperature needs to decrease in time to incubate at an eggshell temperature of 37.8C (=100ºF), especially after 10 days of incubation when the embryos start to produce more and more heat.

An easy method to measure this eggshell temperature is by using an infrared thermometer and measure the temperature of the eggshell. Such an thermometer is available at HatchTech Incubation Technology.

Regards,

Inge Reijrink & Roos Molenaar

This is amazing. I need to know the name of the broiler breed from which eggs were taken to perform this trial and in which country. What was the difference in weight gain on day 31 and day 35 of the chicks hatched from HatchTech incubators in relation to the chicks hatched from other brands of incubators using eggs from the same breed? Thanks to HatchTech technology. Go ahead with your R & D.

Dr Sabur
CEO & Poultry Industry Specialist
FTDC Trade & Consultation
Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dear Ing Rejink and Roose,

Excellent work.
Have you cheaked the size and capacity of lungs also in longer chicks?
Does longer chicks have less incidence of Ascities?
When your trial is completed, please calculate the F.C.R. of feed also.
Waiting for reply,
With best wishes and regards,

Dr. Munawar Ali

We have evaluated the relationship between hatchling length or weight and slaughter weight, breast meat yield and feed conversion ratio (FCR) in both male and female broilers in two experiments.

Results showed that in male broilers a positive relationship was found between hatchling length and slaughter weight or breast meat yield, but no relationship was found with hatchling weight. In female broilers, a negative relationship between hatchling weight and breast meat yield was found. The relation between chick length and performance was not found in the first experiment, but in the second experiment we found a positive relation. No relationship between hatchling length and FCR in both male and female broilers was found.

We concluded that hatchling length rather than hatchling weight seems to have a predictive value in males for slaughter weight and breast meat yield. In females, this is less clear. Additionally, FCR seems not to be related with hatchling length.

Results of this experiment are published in World’s Poultry Science Journal, 2008, Volume 64, p. 599-604

This article does not reveal the relation of egg size with chick length. Age of the flock also has impact on chick length. How a hatchery manager expects more chick length from early weeks of egg production.

It's a nice work. I believe early mortality was much less in large chick length group. Do you have data on mortality by time, early, middle and late? As someone mentioned already, we need to find out relation between egg size and chick length because it may give us more opportunity to improve incubation technology.