How to improve the quality of the chick?

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The most significant impact of incubation is not only on the number of chicks hatched but on how they will grow and develop. The first thing to understand is that a good hatchability index does not always indicate good chick quality. Many practices that increase hatchability can negatively affect the quality of most chicks.

Healthy, vigorous chicks that are not contaminated by bacteria, fungi, or viruses are essential to poultry productivity. The quality of the chick can be influenced by the handling conditions of the egg from the selection, transport, storage, the entire incubation process, the processing in the hatchery, and the transport to the farms.

To improve chick quality, it is important to understand the impact of egg handling circumstances and environmental conditions during incubation on the development of internal organs. It can affect bird health by negatively affecting immunity, cardiac function, intestinal physiology, bone development, locomotor ability, and fur and feather development. Very probably, deteriorations in these physiological systems that occur during embryonic development, generally due to excess temperature and reduction in ventilation, have no solution during post-hatching life and consistently reduce the growth capacity and resistance of birds to Adverse conditions.

How to measure the chick quality?

Every hatchery manager knows the importance of chick quality, but the most frequently asked question is: what is the best system to determine chick quality? Among the proposed chick quality assessment systems are PASGAR (Boerjan, 2002), Cervantes (Cervantes, 1994), Hill (Hill, 2001), and Tona (Tona, 2005).

Some of these methods are used commercially, but it is challenging to maintain all of them as routine practice in hatcheries due to the high production volume and variability between flocks and machines. There is even still a technical and scientific debate about the most relevant parameters to determine the quality of the chick.

Among the parameters that are