Preventing infection, dehydration helps ensure good chick quality

It’s well established that good chick quality is a prerequisite for broilers to perform well throughout grow-out. Too often, however, poor chick quality goes unnoticed until excessive first-week mortality is reported. Fortunately, this is a scenario that can be avoided with careful attention to key factors that can impair chick health.
By Philip A. Stayer, DVM
Corporate Veterinarian, Sanderson Farms, Inc.
Laurel, MS, USA
 
We all know that healthy breeder flocks are more likely to produce healthy chicks. So, if the breeder flock is healthy but chick quality is poor or chick mortality is elevated, what’s the reason? In my experience, one common but often-overlooked cause is the way eggs are handled at the hen farm and hatchery.
A bacterial infection is usually at the root of poor chick quality and elevated chick mortality, but chicks rarely get infected at the farm — at least during the first week. The infection almost always starts at the hatchery.
As long as eggs are not delivered by Cesarean section, they will harbor bacteria, at least on the shell surface. Eggs that are allowed to sweat before hatch, that have a lot of feathers or are left in litter too long or on dirty floor mats can become contaminated with bacteria.
Problems at transfer
Another source of bacterial contamination — and a common one — occurs during transfer. This is usually due to improper sanitation of either transfer machines or hatcher trays. Transfer from setters to hatchers is more problematic nowadays because it often involves punching a hole in the shell for in ovo vaccine injection. Transfer machines touch every egg hatched in the hatchery and have been associated with poor chick quality if improperly maintained.
Antibiotics administered at transfer have been shown to improve flock livability because no hatchery-sanitation program is perfect. However, with mounting pressure to reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics that are also needed in human medicine, many broiler operations have elected to discontinue using an antibiotic in the hatchery. Poor sanitation and other mis-management practices become more evident as untreated bacteria compromise egg quality and chick health.
Regardless of whether an antibiotic is used, there should be procedures in place to ensure that routine maintenance and sanitation of trays are up to par. When bacterial contamination is identified, transfer-equipment suppliers should also be intimately involved in resolving the problem. Animal-health...