Lawrence Alexander (Alex) Adornato

In this assignment, I talked about the economics of broiler breeder production and hatchery management. These parts of the industry are extremely important and connected to the other parts of the business.

            Broiler breeders are the start of the entire operation. In the poultry industry, we are always worried about getting broiler chicks started as early as possible and with the greatest advantage for growth possible. The earliest that broiler chicks can be affected is when they are embryos, which is where the broiler breeders come in. Broiler breeders are the source of those chicks (source of the embryos), and so they are integral to the rest of the operation. If broiler breeders are not grown/vaccinated properly, we may lose to many of them, they may not lay enough eggs/any eggs at all, lay low quality eggs, or lay infertile eggs. All of this can lead to shortages in hatching eggs, a high percentage of infertile eggs, low chick quality, and high first week mortality. This can cause the hatchery to not be able to produce enough chicks or high quality chicks. This may lead to broiler farmers going without birds and farmers seeing high mortality in the first week of the growout. This will cause there to be bird shortages at the plant which will decrease the amount of time that the plant can run, which is very expensive. This lack of birds will lead to shortages in further processing, which could lead to the complex losing a contract. Poor chick quality can also lead to poor uniformity in the broiler flocks which can make management and processing of these flocks difficult. This is not to say that all chick problems come from the breeders. Plenty of chick problems can be traced back to the hatchery. The problems mentioned above are problems that, once created, can’t really be fixed.

            The hatchery is an extremely important part of the complex. The hatchery has to make sure that they produce the most high quality chicks possible. In order to do that, the hatchery must be as sanitary as possible, make sure that the incubators and setters are in good working order and set properly, make sure that the eggs are put through the embrex machine properly, and vaccinated properly after hatching. If the hatchery has to high of a bacterial load, it could cause some of the eggs to become infected and die, decreasing the hatch rate. It could also cause some chicks to not develop properly, which would decrease chick quality. If the incubators and setters do not work properly or are set to an incorrect temperature or humidity, hatch rates will decrease and chick quality will decrease. If chicks are not vaccinated properly, some chicks may be vaccinated and others may not be. If the vaccine is a live vaccine, this can cause a rolling infection throughout the house which will decrease performance. If chicks are not vaccinated at all, they will be susceptible to many diseases and the farmer may see a drop in performance and an increase in mortality. All of these problems can cause the broiler farms to receive to few chicks or low quality chicks. This can lead to some farmers not getting chicks, high mortality rates, and poor uniformity. This can then impact the processing and further processing plants by there being bird shortages, the birds being more difficult to process, and higher condemnation rates.