HOW TO REDUCE POULTRY LOSSES(MORTALITY) AND INCREASE PROFITS
How to reduce poultry losses(mortality) and increase profits
If your chickens are dying needlessly and you are looking for ways to reduce poultry mortality on your farm, we invite you to continue reading.
First, you and I can agree that the death of birds represents a huge economic loss for any farmer. The more birds that die in your poultry farm, the lower your income and ultimately your profit.
Therefore, a good farmer will do everything he can to reduce the number of poultry deaths on his farm.
What are the common causes of sudden death in poultry
There are many reasons for the early death of chicks in the poultry farm.
- Poor nutrition and hygiene can lead to dead chicks.
- Stress and lack of adequate ventilation in the brood are also common causes of high chicken mortality.
- Additionally, the quality of the chickens you stock your farm will determine their survival on your farm.
For example, if you are stocking chickens with yolk sac infection, it is more likely that they will die early. However, after a week of stocking, mortality is likely to result from predation, disease, or suffocation.
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How to prevent and reduce poultry mortality
What level of chicken mortality should I expect? It is useful to consider death in the farm as two different “times”:
- Mortality in the first week after placement
- Death by the second week onward.
Mortality in the first week is usually due to the quality of day-old chicks, which is often beyond the capacity of the breeder. Although a loss rate of up to/about 1.5% in the first week is not unusual, it is definitely worth taking steps to minimize your losses.
In the life of the flock, you should try to make the death rate as low as possible. After the first week, if the death rate is more than 1% in a day, you should investigate the cause and fix it.
You should also consider contacting a veterinarian or poultry consultant for additional advice.
What can I do to reduce poultry mortality on my farm?
1. Buy quality chicks from trusted suppliers
This is often the beginning of a problem for many farmers.When you buy poor and unhealthy chickens, you may have a high mortality rate in your poultry farm. Many health problems affecting birds are due to poor genetics or early life.
Many poor and unhealthy chickens are the result of poor parents. Some hatcheries are not popular because they breed poor mothers to produce fertile eggs.
Many people buy eggs from bad parents stock farm at give away price mainly to get more profit. Some poultry farmers don’t dare to find out where the eggs come from.
This is a horrible practice. If you do this practice, you will stop neglecting the important things that affect your farm.
You end up buying chicks you don’t know anything about, so you end up raising problem chicks that waste your money. The best thing to do is to know where the eggs come from and where your chicks are from.
Also know the history of the birds that lay those eggs. Additionally, check the health status of each bird before transporting them to your farm.
2. Protects the flock from extreme cold
Do everything you can to avoid exposing your bird to extreme cold conditions.
Extreme cold can wreak havoc on your farm. You may wake up one morning and find that most of your chickens have died overnight.
The best way to protect chickens from the cold is to keep them warm during the cold season. You can also design the enclosures so that you don’t expose your bird to extreme cold conditions.
3. Reduce the risk of suffocating the chicks to death.
Birds can die easily and die when things push them into tight corners, forming piles. Birds under the pile may die or be injured.
The death of chickens from stress can happen at any age of the bird’s life. However, you can avoid some things more easily than others.
First, you need to make sure that the temperature and humidity in the brooder are at the right level. And to have the right level, you need to make sure that the temperature and humidity are the same in the garden.
If parts of your pen are too cold, for example, they can clump together and suffocate in your efforts to keep them warm.
A simple tip to prevent your bird from suffocating to death is to regulate the temperature in the garden. When the light source is in the middle, the bird will not need to be pushed to one side of the garden and locked.
Secondly, try to avoid sudden and loud noises around the bird. a loud noise can make the birds panic and gather together.
Be careful of any place where there is noise that can startle birds, such as low-flying airplanes. If your farm is near an air station, you can communicate with the operators to prevent the plane from flying over your farm.
A third way to reduce the risk of bird suffocation is to control or eliminate predators from your farm. This can help avoid the risk of panic attacks that can lead to depression.
4. Rinse regularly and replace any remaining water
Make sure you wash your bird’s water drinkers regularly.
It is also important to discard any remaining water and replace it with clean water. Do not use water from a stream or river you do not know where it came from.
Also avoid filling your drinkers with chlorinated water. Be sure to rinse thoroughly so as not to contaminate fresh water with soap or detergent.
When you dispose of food and water, do it properly in the storage area. In this way, you will prevent the army ants from attacking your farm and killing your chickens.
5. serve water before feeds
Water is very important for the growth and development of birds.
This is also true for any animal. The reason for this advice is to prevent the chicken from stampeding themself while struggling for food.
Naturally, chickens drink water more slowly than they eat. Placing the water first will distract some chickens attention to focus on drinking.
By the time you introduce the food, the struggle will no longer be so great because only some will eat while others will drink. In this way, you can reduce the risk of mortality in your poultry farm.
6. Prevent disease from causing death in your poultry farm
Some diseases can wipe out your entire flock at once.
There are diseases that may not cause the death of any bird, but may affect feed conversion ratio of the birds.
This can affect chicken size and harvest, meat quality and egg production. As part of your plan, be sure to identify diseases that may pose a risk to birds on your farm and know the main symptoms.
Ask a veterinarian or poultry consultant for advice.
Some key factors that can increase the risk of infection include
- the number of birds in the farm
- keeping different species of birds together
- Your rotational management of the land
- feed type and source
- Stress level
- Breed type and more.
7. Avoid feeding poultry birds with moldy feeds
Avoid moldy feed to prevent poultry mortality.
In an effort to cut costs, you are putting your birds’ lives at risk by feeding them moldy feed. moldy feed can be dangerous and toxic to your chickens.
Feeding your bird this type of food is really dangerous. Birds can easily get sick or even contact disease from the bad feeding.
How to avoid feed moldy on your farm:
- Always keep feed away from water.
- Avoid storing your feed in storage rooms with very high humidity.
- Order for the quantity of feed that your birds will finish before the end of its shelf life.
- Check the expiration date on the feed before buying. When you store feed properly in dry conditions and high temperature, the shelf life of poultry feed can reach 4 months.
8. Keep the predators away from your poultry farm
Almost all chicken predator will eat chicken if given the chance.
Dogs, cats, birds and owls all kill birds.
Similarly, rats and snakes eat chicken. You need to determine the main threats to predators on your farm and take the necessary precautions before problems start.
Since predators pose a risk, you should lock up your birds at night. You should also make sure that the poultry house is predator proof, preventing predators from entering.
Remember that a house that protects birds does not prevent predators. Predators may try to get under the roof or into the house.
Even a small hole in the house itself or the vines around the garden can pose a risk. You can not imagine where the predators will come to save your bird.
A good way to keep large predators like cats and dogs away is to use electric fences.
For flying predator such as hawks, you can run a thin line there to make it difficult for predators to get in and out.
Strong rope for this job. Be sure to close all openings around the farm and regularly inspect your farm for any signs of predators.
Be sure to install strong iron mesh net around the fence and install predator repellent.
9. Follow a schedule of medications and vaccinations
It is a good farming practice to vaccinate any new flock you raise on your farm. This will help prevent the outbreak of infectious diseases that can lead to the destruction of birds in your farm.
Vaccinate your bird against some deadly diseases like Newcastle Disease (ND), Fowl Pox, Avian Typhoid, Gumboro Disease, etc. Many farms may vaccinate their chickens before selling them. Do confirm from them so that you dont go ahead and overdose the birds
You need to get the vaccination and treatment schedule for the type of poultry you are raising.
Medicines such as dewormers and antibiotics are very important for the health of your chickens and other types of poultry. So you have to keep the right stock of drugs and vaccines that you need to reduce poultry mortality.
10. Preventing ammonia build-up in the litter system of poultry farms
Ammonia builds up in the farm when litter get wet or when you leave them in your garden for a long time.
Wet litter emits ammonia gas that can be dangerous to birds. When the level of ammonia in the air exceeds 25 ppm, it can cause severe stress in birds.
Problems such as eye and nasal irritation, poor nutrition, and slow growth can result. Other diseases like coccidiosis and respiratory diseases like coryza, bronchitis, etc. can even attack birds.
To avoid this, always remove the wet or compacted litters from the pen and replace it with a new one as soon as possible. This will prevent your chickens, turkeys and quails from dying from suffocation or other respiratory problems.
11. Maintains complete cleanliness and hygiene
Ensure biosecurity – disinfect poultry farming equipment
Diseases can enter the farm through workers, feed, water, new birds, visitors and/or wild or stray birds.
This can happen if you don’t take poultry health and biosecurity seriously. Many farmers do not bother to monitor the number of birds on their farm.
In this way, when the birds die, they will not know for several days how the body smells.
When you don’t take steps to protect your farm, disease can enter your farm and infect your birds. Therefore, it is very important that you maintain cleanliness and hygiene in the poultry house and around you.
12. Feed your bird well
When you don’t feed your birds properly, they can’t grow and produce well.
Malnourished birds will always have low body weight and weak response. As a result, birds can quickly get sick and die.
So make sure you are feeding enough and avoid overeating, which can lead to other problems.
Tips for viewing and identifying poultry sick bird.
Observing and monitoring your birds is something every poultry farmer must do every day.
As soon as you enter your chicken coop in the morning, make sure you watch your birds before you feed them. You should pay attention to the following points when watching birds in your farm:
The activeness:
Do they approach you or not show signs of knowing your presence? If they are busy, go to the next step.
Check their stool for anything abnormal:
Check if your bird’s stool is different from normal, which should be gray stool with a white cap. If you think something different from normal, such as blood-colored stools, yellow or greenish stools, then somewhere, somewhere, something is wrong with these birds.
Look for weak and/or dead birds and remove them from the yard.
Check weak or sick birds to see if the weakness is due to an accident. Look for any birds that may have been stung and have wounds on their skin. If you find any, immediately separate them from the herd.
