Why I’m Excited about My Next Batch of Poultry Birds

 Yes, as a poultry farmer myself with many years of experience with losses and many great successes along the line.

I can confidently say no matter how experienced you are in poultry farming, every batch of poultry birds you rear, it comes with its own different challenges and experience.

Every batch of birds you are expecting comes with a mix of feelings, the natural fear of the unknown and high expectations of success.

Most especially if you live in regions with extreme weather conditions, natural disasters and certain peculiar endemic poultry diseases.

You need to keep the hope alive knowing fully well that your livelihood and that of your family largely depends on poultry farming.

Poultry farming is like a handcraft that comes with experience over time, no matter what you’ve learnt from the internet, poultry farming books, seminars and even from experience poultry farmers.

Nothing can be compared to the practical experience you’ve personally experienced on your own poultry farm. These should also be applicable to every poultry farmer.

Some of the major reasons why you should be excited about your next batch of chickens, it’s your ability to be able to:

Identify Mistakes and Errors of the Past Batches of Poultry Birds Kept on your Farm to Your Advantage

As a poultry farmer, you can attest to the fact that you have made a lot of painful avoidable and costly mistakes including myself.

• Mistakes range from purchasing poultry birds from low-standard hatcheries, which implies failure from the onset.
• Typical brooding baby chicks Mistakes include

1. Not giving your birds glucose in their water upon arrival on your poultry farm. This will enable them to have enough energy to start eating and moving around. Thus reducing the mortality rate due to stress to the barest minimum.
2. Not adhering to biosecurity measures in keeping both bacterial and viral diseases at bay.
3. The inability to provide bright light in your poultry pen (house) is key to ensuring hitch-free, low mortality during brooding. Bright light allows the birds to see their feed and encourages them to start eating right away thus giving them enough energy to keep warm and to add weight rapidly.
4. Lack of timely and appropriate vaccinations
5. Inadequate brooding temperature is one of the major course of failure in poultry farming. Most poultry farmers either provide less brooding temperature or no temperature at all, or the temperature provided is high. Which may lead to heat stress, pasty butt, poor feed intake etc.
6. Uneven distribution of drinkers and feeders for baby chicks poses a serious challenge to the growth of the birds. This may lead to dehydration and poor feed intake, implying that the birds will have difficulty gaining weight.
7. Poor security measures are put in place to ward off criminals and most importantly prey on birds such as wild cats, raccoons, jackals, wolfs, and rodents that prey on baby chicks. The pen of the chicks should be built in such a way and manner that its inaccessible to these predators (sturdy).
8. Starting your birds with the suitable feed a super starter ration with high protein content is appropriate for baby chicks.
9. Avoiding poor absorbent litter, good litter should absorb the chick’s faces i.e. wood shavings.
10. Not providing a good brooder guard that will shield the baby chicks from draft air.

• Poor marketing strategy

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Eliminating and Leveraging on the Lessons Learnt from Past Experience (Previous Batches of Poultry Birds Kept)

There is no doubt you have made many mistakes in the past during the learning curve which is natural, but the big issue now is how you make a huge difference between failure and success this brings us to the real point, why I’m excited about my next batch of chickens.

For sure you have every reason to still be sceptical about your success rate, but after reviewing all critical issues, and mistakes that have led to your poor performance with the previous batches of chickens.

And after making a deliberate and concerted effort towards eliminating and leveraging on the various lessons learnt from past experience.

By putting both human, financial and technical resources together I can only say success and excitement are guaranteed.

When I talk of the resources these include:

1. Buying chicks from a reputable hatchery
2. Ensuring that the birds have a standard and conducive brooding environment, by putting all the parameters the birds need to guarantee their success.
3. Providing a conducive environment for growth, rapid weight gain for broilers and general productivity.
4. Providing standard feed from starter to finisher, a good feeding regime, adequate water (drinkers) feeders, and most importantly good ventilation helps eliminate heat stress and dehydration.
5. Ensure that you make a serious effort in providing good biosecurity within and around the poultry farm.
6. As a result of previous losses to predators and thieves, you should make an effort by providing guard dogs on the farm with good perimeter fencing to ward off petty thieves.
7. Providing adequate vaccinations at various stages of the bird’s life.
8. One of the major challenges faced by most poultry farmers is how to sell their poultry farm products i.e. eggs, broiler meat etc. You should develop a marketing strategy where you have direct access to the consumers, by so doing you are able to eliminate the middlemen and increase your profit margin.

Recommended for you:

How to Market Your Farm Produce, Best Strategy to Adopt.

8 Ways You Can Easily Sell Your Broilers during the Christmas Festive Period

5 Unique Characteristics of a Livestock Business Owner That Will Turn You into a Successful Entrepreneur

Focusing on the Real Issues Why I’m Excited about My Next Batch of Chickens

Excitement comes with passion, positivity and optimism these are the three combinations every poultry farmer needs to be on top of the game.

They say true success comes after failing and failing until no more failure again, then the only last option left is to start succeeding.

Actually, you don’t need to fail and fail, you can as well learn from other people’s failures to kick-start your journey of success.

For me, I can confidently say I have reached that stage in poultry farming where in the absence of natural disaster my excitement knows no bounds.