How to prevent diseases from entering your poultry farms
Bio-security is a practice designed to prevent the spread of disease onto your farm.
Bio-security has three major components:
1.Isolation.
2.Traffic Control.
3.Sanitation.
Learn MoreBio-security Measures:
1. Fencing. stop access of local chicken, villagers, and other intruders into your farm.
2. Keep visitors to a minimum. Egg buyers visit many farms in a day collecting eggs so they can easily transmit disease if not properly handled. Allowing in any one in and out of the farm can easily lead to spread of disease.
3. Limit visitations to other poultry farms, and limit your associations with other farmers. Some diseases like gumboro need to be carried into the farm, and our shoes, our vehicles, our clothes etc can carry these infections.
4. Keep all animals and wild birds out of poultry houses. Some of the wild birds can harbour disease but don’t get affected and when brought nearer to our flocks, the disease get a chance of manifesting in our poultry birds.
5. Practice sound rodent and pest control programs. Rats are known to transmit many diseases from farm to farm. Rats always come in at night and eat from the left overs, and drink on the same water, so they can easily transmit diseases. Rat control include installation of rat baits in and out of the farm and use of poison. Have a strong foundation that cannot be penetrated by rats.
6. Inspect flocks daily and recognize disease symptoms. The roles of the manager at the farm should also include making sure all bio security measures are respected religiously, and going through all flocks to make sure they are fine. In case of any birds showing signs of disease, they should be isolated from the flock and put in the sick bay. We should as well make sure those in the sick bay are catered for well, not just leaving them there to die. Give them clean water, clean feed, as you wait for the vet to check on them.
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7. Good ventilation and relatively dry litter. Many broiler farmers complain about cough and flu in their flocks, but the number one cause of this is poor ventilation and poorly maintained litter. Diarrhea(brown, bloody, etc) are all caused by dumpness in the litter. Maintain the litter dry, and keep the air floor very good.
8. Keep areas around houses and feed bins clean. Some farms are attacked by red ants because of too much debris around the houses, and pouring water through windows making areas around the house very wet. This should be avoided.
9. No exchange of feed and equipments . feeders, drinkers, cages, etc…..(all materials) should not be moved from farm to farm. The same materials can carry infection from one farm to another.
10. Disinfection and sanitisation of poultry house & equipments. After selling of broilers and layers, one should remove all the litter, sweep the house properly, dust off the wire mesh, wash the house with a strong detergent, then spray with a strong disinfectant.
11. Flashing water pipes and keeping the water and feed clean.
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