Explore all the information onPoultry management
Poultry management usually refers to the husbandry practices or production techniques that help to maximize the efficiency of production. Sound management practices are very essential to optimize production. Scientific poultry management aims at maximizing returns with minimum investment. A carefully controlled environment that avoids crowding, chilling, overheating, or frightening is almost universal in poultry farming. Cannibalism, which expresses itself as toe picking, feather picking, and tail picking, is controlled by debeaking at one day of age and by other management practices. The feeding, watering, egg gathering, and cleaning operations are highly mechanized. Birds are usually housed in wire cages with two or three animals per cage, depending on the species and breed, and three or four tiers of cages superposed to save space. Cages for egg-laying birds have been found to increase production, lower mortality, reduce cannibalism, lower feeding requirements, reduce diseases and parasites, improve culling, and reduce both space and labour requirements.
Martin Smith, Lead in Precision Livestock Farming at Evonik Animal Nutrition, speaks about the importance of embracing digitalization in the poultry industry
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Evonik Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) uses advanced technologies to help optimize every stage of livestock production – animal nutrition, health and farming in one holistic approach. Dr. Alfred Petri -Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing Health & Nutrition Business- highlights the key features of this service, during IPPE 2020, in Atlanta, USA....
With a rich history built on more than a century of poultry domestication and study, the modern poultry industry continues to expand its knowledge and mastery of avian care and finding innovative areas of research that help increase the overall success of the industry. These research developments and related topics will be discussed at the International Poultry Scientific Forum (IPSF), held in conjunction with the 2023 International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) in...
INTRODUCTION Chicken domestication started with red junglefowl (Gallus gallus; ALBINO & TAVERNARI 2010) and is native to multiple regions in Southeast Asia (HATA et al. 2021). These birds were first used as fighting animals or in rituals. Then, breeding the species began to be treated as an economical activity to generate profit from the production of meat and eggs (NÚÑEZ-LEON et al. 2019, RUBIN et al. 2010). During this period, animal welfare...
Bill Shannon (BioRankings) talks about microbiome, untargeted metabolomics, and other data that have high potential for changing how biomarker discovery research is done, during the Symposium on Gut Health in St. Louis, USA....
What are the advantages of raising broiler chickens in cages compared to the conventional deep litter rearing in a fully automated system...
Though paper evaporative cooling pads have been used by poultry producers for decades, plastic pads are a relative new phenomenon. As with any new product, there are a lot of questions. By far the most common question is whether plastic pads can produce the same level of air cooling as traditional paper pads. In short, the answer is yes. But just...
Figure 1 illustrates the amount of water which will evaporate from properly wetted, 15 cm paper evaporative cooling pad system, as a function of outside temperature and relative humidity. The amount of water evaporated is provided in terms of gallons per minute per 100,000 cmh of operating tunnel fan capacity. For example, if a house had...
There is some evidence that commercial meat chickens prefer to access the range through ‘favoured’ pop-holes (Taylor et al., 2017); however what makes pop-holes attractive or aversive is unknown. Therefore, we aimed to i) determine the most aversive stimuli associated with pop-holes and ii) identify the most effective artificial structure to minimise aversion. We hypothesised that the simulation of wind, UV light and high light intensity at an artificial pop-hole would be...
Digitize is one of the current “buzzwords” in the animal production industry. But, as with other such terms, it can mean different things to different people. “Digitize” is defined as: “to change something such as a document to a digital form (a form that can be stored and read by computers)” – Cambridge Dictionary Merely making records available in a form that can be accessed via a computer is not enough. What we really need is to...
Figure 1 illustrates the incoming air temperature for a properly wetted, six-inch evaporative cooling pad, while Figure 2 illustrates the predicted incoming relative humidity. The...
Recently we made an in-house gas chamber made up of an acrylic box to analyze CO2 emissions from broiler birds during the growing period. The box acted in a similar way to a respiratory chamber. It is much cheaper and more convenient to analyze GHG emissions from poultry birds.
Specifications:
Acrylic gas chamber
10inch x 10inch x 12inch
CO2 meter: CM-505 (Gaslab plus)
Air pump: Constant airflow from the air pump
Fans in the room: Circulate the air in the room...
Recently we successfully analyze GHG emissions from poultry chicken excreta using the Gas analyzer.
1-5 grams of excreta is sufficient to analyze N2O, CH4, CO2, NH3 emissions from poultry excreta
Equipment: G2508 gas concentration analyzer...
The house has been preheated for 36 hours to 92°F. The chicks will be arriving in a few hours and the controller’s six temperature sensors (positioned one foot above the floor) indicate the air temperature is between 91 and 92°F (Figure 2). A thermal image indicates the floor temperature is between 87 and 102°F...
Introduction Animal welfare has been increasingly included in business agreements and with humane slaughter is a key area of interest (von Keyserlingk and Hötzel, 2015). Retailers, restaurants, and food service companies seek kinder and more responsible farm animal practices (Grandin, 2010; Bayvel et al., 2012). Yet, it is a consensus that changes in attitudes and practices of stakeholders are required to improve farm animal welfare at slaughter (Paranhos da Costa et al.,...
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...
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...
Though there is a wide range of opinions on the optimal drinking water temperature for young chicks, the fact is farm managers actually have a very limited ability to control the temperature of the water their chicks are drinking because, for all practical purposes, it is determined by house air temperature. If the air temperature is 90°F, the water will be around 90°F. If the air temperature is 80°F, the water temperature will be around 80°F, regardless of what temperature...
Why do we, for the most part, give our chicks 24 hours of light during brooding? Do chicks actually benefit from being able to eat and drink at 2 am? Though it is widely believed that 24 hours of light is essential to maximizing chick performance and health, preliminary trails have found no significant benefit in doing so. Numerous...
I. INTRODUCTION The recognition in the late 1960’s that excessive growth rates in broiler breeders were negatively impacting rate of lay and increasing production of unsettable eggs (Jaap and Muir, 1968) has been one of the most transformative events in the history of the hatching egg industry. The resultant feed restriction programs during rearing resolved the issue at the time. But continued genetic progress resulted in feed restriction being necessary throughout...