The breeder industry is well aware that management and nutrition of parent stock play a key role in achieving the maximum number of strong and vital chicks with good vitality. Various aspects of parent stock management considerably influence chick quality. Such aspects are: uniformity of female frame and egg weight, female condition (fleshing & fat reserves) at moment of light stimulation (MOLS), vaccination program and quality of the hatching eggs.
By Ing. Winfridus Bakker
World technical support manager
Cobb-Vantress
Siloam Springs
AR USA
Broiler growers normally don’t like to receive chicks from young breeders. The chicks are smaller and normally with higher first week mortality. It is important for these small chicks to be uniform, which comes from egg and yolk uniformity relating to how we manage hens in rearing.
In the first eight weeks frame uniformity is achieved and from 16 weeks fleshing and fat uniformity is important for good sexual uniformity of the hens. The hens should be as close as possible in size and development throughout rearing.
In figure 1 an average uniformity is observed for the Cobb500 FF breeder tracking the average egg weight and uniformity over an egg packer so that all the hatching eggs of a flock are being traced. As can be seen in this figure, the average uniformity is just below 90% and on average 88% with ±10% spread. This means that chicks hatched from these eggs should have uniformity above 80% at hatch, which is a good number for starting chicks on a broiler farm. At 25 weeks of age the hatching eggs over 50 grams already reach uniformity above 80% and then climb fast to 89% to stabilize.
Figure 1
Female condition at light stimulation
In large integrations it is seen that there is a positive correlation between total feed amount consumed or bodyweight condition of the parent females at the end of rearing (147 days of age) and broiler livability at seven days of age from young breeders.
Parent flocks with not enough nutrient intake or the wrong body condition show the highest first week mortality in broiler chicks in the first 6 weeks of the young parent stock with a negative impact on final broiler results.
Table 1
Table 1 is an example of how mortality and feed intake (female nutrient intake) can show its effect on mortality in first 7 days of age not to mention the impact on uniformity and final results (body weight and feed conversion).
Breeder companies improve broiler feed c...
