01/06/2025
UNDERSTANDING THE BROODING STAGE OF CHICKS β PART 6
In today's episode, I'd like to stress the importance of feed and water management.
You can't be too hygienic in caring for your pullets; they are to be carefully tended to.
Make sure they don't have much dirt in their feed trays or in their water troughs.
To achieve the best results, you need to adopt the "feed a little at a time" technique.
Don't say you don't have time or that you need to be somewhere else, so you just feed them a lot at once.
That will always work against you. From the pullets messing up the feed with their poo to having the feeding trays covered with bedding material, the issues are endless.
What that would cost you is:
1. Poor hygiene for the birds, as they'll be eating feed mixed with their poo
2. Feed wastage, which implies more cost and less result
3. More money spent on treating coccidiosis, leading to excessive use of antibiotics, which could later result in resistance to their effectiveness
4. Loss of appetite; when chicks are given too much food at once, they tend to lose interest in it
Brooding is more than just providing your chicks with a preferable temperature and conditionβit's also the bedrock of what their future performance will look like.
For pullets, to achieve a more uniform weight in your flock, in my experience, you need to find a way to have them caged at about 6β8 weeksβthe earlier, the better.
This helps reduce feed wastage by the growing champs. The grower stage, which begins from about the 8th week, ushers in behavior similar to that of teenagers in humans.
They tend to waste a lot of resources given to them by swirling most of the feed to the ground.
For this reason, some farmers choose to debeak their birds at an early age of about 2β3 weeks.
Debeaking in poultry is the process of gently trimming a birdβs beak to prevent them from hurting each other by pecking.
It also serves as a mechanism to avoid feed wastage, depending on how the debeaking is done. I will talk more about debeaking in a different post.
As an intending farmer, you should also not be too conservative with your heat management while trying to reduce the cost of heat supply.
Know when the heat is right, when it's not enough, and when it's too much.
Chicks tend to isolate themselves away from the source of heat when it's too much.
They hover around the heat source when it's not enough, while they are evenly distributed when the heat is right.
Also note that they might not distribute evenly if the source of lighting is not adequate. This is where attentiveness to their behavior becomes a valuable skill.
I hope you find this useful and resourceful.
See you in the next one π.
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