A couple of weeks ago I posted that most farms fail before their 10th year anniversary, the post raised a lot of questions as to why is that so. For this reason I am using this medium to shed more light on the causes both noticed and unnoticed.

Summarily, I will like to highlight the points which I will buttress as we process. These include:

IMPROPER STRUCTURE
– Wrong orientation
– Substandard structure
– Poor waste management



IMPROPER FEEDING
– Low quality feeds
– Wrong feeding methods
– Incorrect feed quantity.



IMPROPER MEDICATION
– Incorrect diagnosis
– Incorrect drugs
– Incorrect drug administration

POOR MANAGEMENT
– Failure to employ professionals
– Untrained workers.
– Regular replacement of workers

SECURITY

Today I will talk on the role being played by improper structure in the eventual collapse of farms with preference to layer farms, with the assumptions that all the necessities are already catered for.

The soul of every poultry farm are the structures especially the pen houses hence there is need to build the best structure that can provide not only accomodation for the birds but also security and hygiene without compromising quality and longevity of the pen houses.

Firstly pen house orientation is adjudged negligible by most small scale farmers who are usually not trained animal scientists but people with money and passion for the business – they usually construct their pen houses without prior knowledge of how the pen should be positioned, they simply call their carpenter and bricklayer and site the pen house wherever they desire.

Whereas the pen house MUST be in the East – West direction to eliminate the incidence of sun light in the pen as much as possible.

Now let’s analyse the effect of wrong orientation on the birds, production and income. Birds are known to be thermo-regulatory feeders i.e they eat to meet up their body’s energy requirement and are more prone to eat more of carbohydrates when fed with cafeteria feeding method because that supplies more of the energy their body requires (that’s the purpose of feed mixing to enable them eat all the other ingredients responsible for their health and productivity), hence on sunny days they eat less because the energy from the sun takes a quota in their energy requirements and on cold days they eat more in order to meet up their body’s energy requirement.

Therefore when your poultry pen is not properly sited, a portion of the birds are usually in the sun at every hour of the day and those birds in the sun will not eat adequately thereby affecting their production.

Assuming you have 3000 laying birds which are expected to perform at 80% overall, those ones in the sun will not produce beyond 70% and their mortality rate is higher as a result of incessant heat stress, that automatically brings your overall production to around 77% meaning you are unknowingly losing around 3 crates of eggs per day which amount to around 1000 crate in a year (#800,000 @ 800 per crate) that means in the 10 years duration of this study the farmer has lost 8 million naira which can never be recovered.

Assuming he started with 10 million naira that means he has unknowingly lost 80% of his start up capital at which stage the farm is already at the edge of collapsed that’s if he is not yet downsizing and/or in the ocean of debts by then.

Substandard structures are another issue, most farmers just construct a pen house as they desire without putting in mind how long they want the pen to stand. I go to farms and see must of those structures already collapsed and some braced here and there with concretes, Iron pipes and wooden planks (they are only managing the inevitable anyways).

Like I will also say to my clients NEVER build a pen with WOODS- over time the woods are being eaten up by termites and nature as most of these woods get severed from the ground level.

Usually the upper level are still strong if hard wood were used but the rain water over the years had softens the part below the ground level, these leads to a dislocation between the hard and the soft part and the pen is suspended in the surface at the mercy of the wind.

There is no point building a pen that will only last for 10 years with 2 million when you can build one that will last for 30 years with 3 million. I personally recommend the use of concrete pillars as the frame of the pen house and galvanized 4 – 6 inch pipes in between or 4 – 6 inch galvanized pipe althrough.

Maybe I need to add that when pen houses collapse the loss is not limited to the structure only but also the cages and the birds therein (imagine a pen collapsing on 3000 birds and cages, that’s a loss of almost 5 million in a day) most farms I know don’t survive the ordeal of a pen house collapse.

Lastly on the issue of structures I will talk on waste management. Though most lay man farmers didn’t put more of this into consideration when building their pen houses, all they had in mind was a standing roof that can easily accommodate the cages which will house the birds.

They never thought waste management could be an issue in the future owing to the fact that poor waste management means poor hygiene and poor hygiene means poor animal health and poor animal health automatically means poor production and high mortality.

A well constructed pen must be self cleaning and it’s wastes proper disposed (like I will always say to my clients, if you can’t eat in your pen house – your birds are not suppose to live there).

Firstly the self cleaning pen houses requires less labour while the other requires more. For instance, a 3000 laying birds with nipple drinker and self cleaning pen house can be handled by just one worker while the one that’s not self cleaning and in need of regular packing of litters needs at least 3 workers to ensure cleanliness, that automatically means an additional 30,000 monthly salary which equals 360,000 per year and 3.6 million in 10 years.

The farmer has unknowingly lost that much for what he could have corrected from the beginning with maybe an additional 200,000 to the construction cost.

Source :http:[url]//theprofarmer.com/farms-fail-10th-year-part-1/[/url]