6 Factors That Affects Broilers Growth And Production

Upon giving ideas about where to buy the best broiler for you to stock, I have been asked openly and privately on the fastest growing breed of broiler. 

This post will address the factors that make you believe that one hatchery's day old broiler chicks are better than the others. 

As much as possible, I will try to be very explicit in simple language for any reader to understand even though questions can still be asked. 

To continue, I wish to add that I will try as much as possible not to directly promote a particular hatchery over others but state the issues as they are based on joint findings of farmers. There is a distinction between a hatchery and a broiler breed. 

Therefore, for the purpose of understanding of this post, kindly go through the earlier post as I will not mention or describe any broiler by its hatcher/hatchery but by their breed names. 

Now to the most popular broiler breeds in Nigeria, we have Cobb500, Arbor Acre also called AA, Arbor Acre plus also known as AA+, Ross308 and Marshall.

Sad, as it is that most people do not know that different broiler breeds exist, they base their judgement on broiler performance erroneously on a limited scope in terms of the name of the hatchery that they buy from. 

Hence you read or hear Mr. A  claims that Agrited is the best, Mrs. B claims Bounty Harvest is the best, Mr. O claims Olam is the best, Miss Z claims Zartech is the best, Chief S claims Sayed is the best and so on. 

Whereas, they hardly understand the details of what is involved in the differences in performance of what they assume to know.

Now, talking about the most popular breeds of BROILERS in Nigeria, we shall quickly look at what each of them has to offer a farmer so that we can be better guided in making choices of what to stock. 

But before the analysis, it is good to also look at some factors that we should consider such that if those factors vary, a farmer may end up having a bad experience even from a hatchery he or she once praised.

Factor 1: The different breeds hatched by a hatchery.

There are some hatcheries that produce only one breed of broiler while others produce more than one breed. 

If you book day old broiler chicks  from a hatchery that hatches different breeds, chances are that you may get different results under the same conditions in one set from another set of booking from the same hatchery. 

When that happens depending on the breed you got first, your first or next set may not be satisfactory to you in terms of what you want.

Factor 2: Age of parent Stock/Size of day old chicks.

This one is a bit technical. I always advise any serious poultry farmer that have reached me privately on the performance of their birds to make sure that he or she has a weighing scale to monitor the growth of their birds as mere saying "my fowl big well well'" is not the right assessment of performance. 

A scale is a standardized method because my concept of big may be your concept of average or small. But 3Kg is the same all over. 

Still on this, you will agree with me that young parent stock as with other young laying hens start with laying small eggs. As they grow older, their eggs get bigger. 

By extension, a small egg produces a small day old chick while a bigger egg produces a bigger day old chick. When I receive my day old chicks, I weigh each carton on a digital scale with the chicks inside. 

After removing the chicks, I weigh the empty carton and subtract from the combined weight of the carton and chicks to get the weight of the chicks. 

I divide the weight of the chicks with the total number of chicks in the carton to get the average weight of a chick at day old or day 2 as they actually get to me on day 2 even though we claim they are one day old. 

Why do I do that? By knowing how big or small they are, I can monitor their weekly growth compared to a performance chart that I found online depending on their breed. 

I actually found out that day old broilers tend to attain about ten times their day old weight within the first two weeks on the average. 

Therefore, if they arrived on day 1 at an average weight of 32g, I shouldn't expect them to be of the same weight as when I got day old chicks that weighed as much as 50g at day old.

Factor 3: Rearing conditions.

Factor 4: Breed.

Factor 5: Feed variation and quality.

Factor 6: Disease resistance in relation to hatchery, your environment and prevalent diseases.