Hatchery Talks

As a millennial, I grew up with technology, and personally I feel that technology makes life easier. The smartphone in your back pocket connects you to the whole world and the possibilities are endless...

A while ago, I visited a day old broiler chick hatchery in Western Europe. The hatchery manager was having serious discussions with one of his clients, who found first week mortality in the chicks delivered from this hatchery to be too high...

During a seminar just before the summer holidays in Brazil, one of the participants asked about the order of importance for the three factors of temperature, humidity and ventilation, in order to achieve optimised incubation. I replied that all three are relevant, but...

I was recently invited to a layer hatchery that was reporting slightly lower hatchability than its sister hatcheries, despite using eggs from the same flocks with the same pre-setting treatment...

Egg quality is a very important part of incubation. And, as we often say, bad input equals bad output. We simply cannot create good quality chicks from poor quality eggs, as one of my recent hatchery visits proved…

"Why are so many chicks dying in their first week?" I could hear the worry in his voice when I received a call from the manager of a single-stage broiler hatchery in southern Brazil. It was a cold winter ­yes, even in this tropical country temperatures can go below 10°C – and he was getting reports of 3-5% of chicks dying in their first week. And in some cases even 10%...

At a recent event, I met someone from a poultry housing equipment company. He asked my opinion on the trend for more and more modern houses to be equipped with automatic laying nests, suggesting that litter nests with manual egg collection seemed destined to become a thing of the past...

In my many visits to hatcheries around the world over the years, a mistake that I regularly encounter is that hatchery managers underestimate the importance of managing the climate around the setters and hatchers...

Recently, one of our South American customers contacted our local agent. Despite excellent hatchability overall, they had, over several weeks, observed weak, listless and even dead chicks at the moment of pulling...