How to create proper bedding for your chicks

Chicken on fresh bedding. [Courtesy]

The cold and rainy season is here with us now and every poultry farmer is worried about the eminent surge in the cost of brooding their day-old birds to the third week of life. This week though I want to dwell on the need to keep your litter dry under the current challenges of cold and rainy weather.

Keeping litter dry is a critical part of overall management on every poultry farm. Litter conditions influence bird performance, which in turn affects profits of growers and integrators. Dry litter helps control ammonia levels, provides a healthy flock environment, and reduces condemnations due to hock and footpad burns and breast blisters. So, it is extremely important to keep this litter dry.

There are several types of litter sources in use and these include wood shavings (most popular in Kenya), rice hulls, coffee husks and occasionally some farmers use saw dusts, which I highly discourage. These materials are spread in the poultry unit floor at a depth of 4-8 inches deep before allowing birds on them to supply the needed warmth and bedding services to the young birds.

To keep this litter dry always, it is incumbent for all farm workers to provide enough heat in the first 2-3 weeks during the brooding period to lift any damp moisture and then provide minimum ventilation to remove this damp air out of the units. When litter begins to retain moisture it will clump together, which is referred to as caking. This phenomenon is common during this rainy and cold season when farmers tend to close the units completely without allowing for the exchange of fresh air into the barns and loss of stale humid air, through what I term as minimum ventilation.

To put it into perspective, one broiler chicken will drink two times the amount of feed it takes, so in 35 days one broiler will drink about 7 liters of water. Twenty thousand birds will take in 140,000 litres of water, of which only 20 per cent is used for growth and the rest 80 per cent or 112,000 litres of water is released on the litter. This water must be removed by constant ventilation and manual turning or raking of the litter otherwise it will lead to caking with a serious deterioration in performance.

Once cake starts to form, it is difficult to reverse the process. It usually requires over-ventilation to correct the problem, which can lead to excessive charcoal use during cold weather. Caked litter also increases house ammonia levels. Negative effects of ammonia on broiler health, welfare, performance, and carcass quality have been well documented. Poultry is most susceptible to elevated ammonia levels at 1 to 21 days of age, which is the early brooding period. Unfortunately, farmers often underestimate ammonia levels if they depend on their eyes and noses for detection. Most farmers become somewhat desensitised to ammonia after long-term exposure, making it difficult to accurately gauge ammonia levels in their houses.

In worse situations, the litter can turn completely wet and result into severe gastro-intestinal infections due to coccidiosis or bacterial infections which will result in loss of daily weight gain, poor feed conversion, and mortality.

In farms where birds are kept for egg production, I have witnessed a trend where farmers remove all the old litter and sell them to crop/vegetable farmers during the rainy season as manure, raking in a substantial amount of income. Chicken manure is rich in Nitrogen at 1.63 per cent, Phosphorus at 1.54 per cent and Potassium at 0.085 per cent and is widely used as natural fertilisers in vegetable farms. Although this is an additional revenue for farmers, my advice is to avoid completely removing this manure from the poultry units. Leave at least a half at any time of sale of manure to enable regeneration of coccidia organisms in the litter to ensure immunity against coccidiosis is always maintained in the population. If you completely remove old litter and replace with new material, you risk a flare-up of coccidiosis in your flock.

[Dr Watson Messo is the Head Vet at Kenchic.

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