Being a successful poultry farmer is not easy. You have to be updated with all the new technologies, take care of your stock quality, and improve the chances of maximising your profits by making informed decisions on time.
Most farmers don’t realise the importance of gut health and how much money they are flushing down the drain by ignoring this crucial factor.
Since the gut is the largest organ in the chicken body, it plays a vital role in the chicken’s immunity, growth, and feed it requires to grow up to an optimum level.
Chickens with a weak gut have higher chances of getting sick, dying, and consuming more food for weight gain. When added up, these factors can lead to severe losses to the poultry farmer, which is why knowing how to maintain a healthy gut improves your chances of success.
Gut health of the chicken is affected by the following factors:
- Quality of the Breed and Health of the Parent Stock: A healthy parent gives birth to healthy chicks, increasing the chances of them surviving after being born.
- Diet and Feed Quality: Diet can be affected by the raw materials used to make feed, size of the grain or drastic changes in feed type.
- Improper management: During high-stress events like vaccinations feed change or changes in environmental conditions, chickens are more prone to have improper gut development.
- Infection and diseases: Presence of a safe environment for chickens from pests, viruses, bacteria and mycotoxins is necessary for good results.
A good farmer considers all these factors to get the best broiler chickens with healthy immune systems for them. But if the parent stock itself is weak, there is nothing a farmer can do to increase its yield.
It is vital to get your parent stock from breeders who have high-quality breeder programs.
A good breeder company will ensure that all the parent breeder chickens have excellent intestinal health, have an effective vaccination program, well-equipped facilities for the parent stock to prevent any progeny problems in future.
One such company is Aviagen which has the reputation of being a research-based globally recognised poultry breeding company with customers in more than 100 countries. It develops pedigree lines of commercial broiler chickens according to the specific needs of the area and market.
Aviagen invests heavily in the research and development of chicken breeds. Its strict biosecurity program helps them deliver high-quality parent chickens that produce progeny with good health. It has been consistently providing high-quality breeding stock to its customers since 1923.
Their parent breed, Ross 308 AP is specially designed to offer superior gut health which helps breeder farmers by producing high chick numbers and robust chickens.
The breed is designed while keeping chicken health in mind and is a strong bird that is already successfully tested in the US and Latin America. It offers numerous traits like high meat yield, excellent growth rate, great immunity, improved gut health, and feed efficiency.
To know more about the breed, Visit the breeder page.