Importance of keeping the litter dry

The calculator provides a starting point. Are you monitoring house humidity and adjusting minimum ventilation rates accordingly?

Nice Information

Hi Mike, I am following the UGA app to calculate min vent, it seems to be quite aggressive at times, over ventilating, as in dropping cold air on the birds before the heaters kick in is causing problems, not saying it’s just vent levels, other factors to consider, feed quality etc . But to maintain low humidity seems really difficult when outside humidity is averaging 85% on a good day. Is it a case of more air is better or is there a point where you say back it off. Humidity in house is not excessive but litter capped and not improving.

This pens are old and the only ones not controlled by a computer, so we have data loggers on them , every morning we read the humidity and temperature inside the pen and we check out how they were during the 24 hours before. So with this information and the one provided by the weather channel app, we introduce it in the calculator providing at the same time the water consumption of the day before and the fan RPM used for the minimum ventilation.

Our business is Quail production and the pens we are talking about are ours smallest pens with a capacity of 25.000 birds each one. We run periods of time of about 3 or 4 minutes (adjusting proportionally with the results of the 5 minutes program on the minimum ventilation calculator on your website) and our air inlets are in the ceiling and they are counterweight, we have circulation fans (we took the idea from your seminary) and our litter have been a problem due to summer time and an over population. We tried to keep 10.000 birds more for 3 weeks with the intention to drop them down to the pen downstairs. We use shavings as a bed and we are controlling it as much as we can. We decided to reduce the numbers of birds to the original capacity.

Hi Dr, I got a question for you, if you don't mind, could you tell me why the minimum ventilation cycles are always based on a 5 minutes time, I mean every time I use the calculator the time on and off is always based in 5 minutes. and how can it affect the system if we have cycles of less and more than five minutes. The president of the poultry company always change the cycles to less than 5 minutes and I have noticed that with shorter cycles we save more propane but we have most of the time and increase on the humidity with the consequential effect of wet litter and in some cases high ammonia levels in quails in the first two weeks.