Vencomatic seminar focuses on managing perfection
Poultry production is demanding higher efficiency standards in the years to come, says Vencomatic. Company sizes are getting bigger and becoming more complex, feed supply will become more expensive, and finding skilled personnel is not an easy task either. These and other factors force producers to find efficient solutions. Vencomatic aims to have these solutions by understanding the link between the chicken, the producer and the system, resulting in “managing perfection”. A seminar on this topic took place in Thai captital Bangkok, on the day before VIV Asia opens it doors.
Over the course of years, Vencomatic has proved to be a trendsetter in developing innovative poultry housing concepts. Up till now, their main focus has been on housing systems for layers and broiler breeders. However, with their Patio concept, they also moved into broiler production recently.
The seminar mainly focused on breeder management. Also the Patio system and its advantages were explained to the audience, which consisted of poultry professionals from allover Australasia.
In his presentation on producing high quality hatching egg, Peter Schreurs of Vencomatic advised the audience to go inside the breeder house in the early morning and just watch the breeders for a couple of hours. “It will make you aware on how the birds behave”, he said. Based on this awareness and the characteristics of an egg, Vencomatic developed their automatic egg collection systems.
“The number of eggs that will be produced in manual systems versus automatic systems is similar”, says Peter Schreurs. “But what about the number of collected eggs and the quality of these eggs?” Based on their own research and extensive field tests in Brazil, Vencomatic says that on average a breeder will produce 3.5 more hatching eggs when these are collected in an automatic system. Not just that, since an egg will not warm up various times, like in a traditional nest, the embryonic development will not be activated each time. Also contamination will be less, since the vulnerable cuticle of the egg will be better protected and less bacteria will enter through the shell pores.
Both these two factors result in a higher hatchability, said Schreurs, who also addressed the importance of housing lay-out and feeding intervals on mating efficiency.
Another way of improving efficiency is keeping breeders in the Veranda colony system. By doing so, more birds can be kept in a house, also preventing hatching eggs from becoming contaminated and thus leading to a higher hachability.
Finally, sales and marketing director Erik Helmink of Vencomatic explained the new Patio system. In this system, hatching eggs are directly taken from the hatcher into the broiler house. This enables chicks to hatch directly on the spot where they have immediate access to feed and water. Currently the system is being installed on a limited scale in Russia. “Once these operations are running and managed properly, Vencomatic will increase production and also start building other facilities”, said Helmink. This is supposed to happen in the course of this year.
Related website: Vencomatic
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