The Honeymoon Flock

The first flock high is something that most farms have experienced, the house is finished and the first cohort of birds are housed. Usually the farm owners have a high level of anxiety about what th new enterprise may entail and the various arms of the industry gather round to support. Lighting patterns are discussed, ration changes and flock management, and every day that passes until the first eggs run down the belt can be anxious. Then the birds tend to come into lay in force when they are lit up with highs in the 96-97% range at times and most of the time this flock goes along so easily that it sets an unrealistic precedent for the next to flock to follow.

One of the biggest lessons you see when you look across a large amount of sites you see, is that you should take the approach a veteran layer farmer will use on flock six from the very first flock. As there is a minimal disease burden in the shed for the first flock, if any, a site can often “get away” with minimal health interventions such as Infectious Bronchitis vaccination, worm counts and worming, checking for red mite, water sanitisation and flushing. If the first flocks of birds leaving is followed by a less then thorough wash down and disinfection a well established trend happens almost without fail. The birds peak a bit lower, tend to have a disease challenge around weeks 35-45 with dips in production and lower peaks, raised mortality and a generally harder time.

Myself and the people I work with have come to the conclusion that the key to ensuring the highest levels of production is to start as you mean to go on. Habits are very powerful things and establishing effective flock health controls from the first step out of the blocks is the common factor in the farms that average out the highest levels of production over a 5 year period. It is akin to what we repeatedly saw in most of the Olympic track events, it matters little who is ahead at the start (in this analogy “doing hardly anything” and getting good production during the honeymoon). The long term winners are the ones that are going strong halfwayway and at the end of the race. This is why St. David’s and Rosehill encourage a strong preventive health management strategy, built around effective vaccination, monitoring of worm levels, red mite monitoring, a keen attention to water quality and effective terminal disinfection.

I see the disease pressure on a farm being similar to a bucket of water under a leaky tap, our goal should be to ensure that whether its flock two or flock twenty, we are ensuring every flock of new birds comes into a place of minimal challenge, and the bucket is empty at the start, and not half full with the challenges of the flocks prior. This is done by preventing issues during every flock by effective interventions such regular vaccinations, accurate and effective parasite controls of worms and red mite and by ensuring the wat system continues to provide safe and clean water.

The honeymoon need not end, but similar to the sporting world, the gold medals belong to the most obsessive, and there are no shortcuts.