Nutrition play a critical role in poultry production interms of cost (70-75% cost of production) and production performance. Poor nutrition can undermine the production performance and increase the cost of production.

Two week ago I was in a farm to consult for a farm that knows that their birds production is too low and they have try many things to improve the performance but no tangible results.

When I got to the farm, I did my assessment and I found out that they are two major problems that contributed to their production challenge which includes feeds and feeding.

With the capacity almost 7000 layers, the best thing the farm can do is to produce their own feed on the farm since they have equipment to do that and raw material accessibility is not a big challenge.

Its was my responsibility to train and developed a feed formula that the farm will adopt to feed their birds.

I trained the farm staff on feed production and I developed a layers and broilers feed formula that will ensure a good performance.

All this was done within 5 days including my arrival and departure, Before I left the farm I placed a particular pen on the feed that I formulated because those birds in that pen had the lowest production performance before my visit and I begin to monitor the performance. The main reason I didn't place others on the feed immediately was due to the quantity of commercial feed in store and they need to make use of it.

Within 2 weeks of feeding, the egg production begin to increase from 50% prior to my visit to 78.8%. The other pens started eating my formulated feed 3 days after the first pen.

I have been monitoring the farm production and the results is overwhelming and seriously encouraging.

The birds that has been struggling with 50% is now producing 78.8%, another pen that was on 60% is now on 80.5% and the last pen that was on 70% is now on 87.9%.

Apart from increase in production, the cost of production the feed is #1000 cheaper than the commercial feed. (Dr. IDRIS)