Extension Experts Develop Premier Poultry House Site
Broadly speaking, healthy birds mean healthy profits for poultry producers — which explains why growers typically spend a big part of their day in careful walk throughs of their operations.
Yes, it’s time consuming and maybe even a little tedious for some growers, but it’s something they simply can’t avoid. If some facet of the poultry house isn’t working at peak efficiency, there’s a strong likelihood the birds aren’t either.
“It’s all about bird maintenance — maintaining the healthiness of that flock,” says Dr. Gene Simpson, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System economist and Auburn University professor of agricultural economics, who works with poultry growers throughout the state helping them identify ways to enhance this efficiency.
The problem for poultry growers is the mind-boggling number of factors that could go wrong in a house and that can contribute to reduced efficiency — everything from leaky drinking systems to faulty tension in the house fans. That is why more growers are turning to www.poultryhouse.com, hosted on the Extension Web site.
Simpson runs the site along with Jim Donald, an Extension biosystems engineer and Auburn professor of biosystems engineering, and Jesse Campbell, an Auburn natural resources adviser.
Poultryhouse.com is based on a simple premise — that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But the site not only helps growers troubleshoot problems associated with poultry house operations but also offers solutions for rendering these operations more cost effective.
The problem is that many commercial poultry houses were built years ago and lack many of the features that best secure operating efficiency.
“Most of these houses were constructed at a time when propane costs ran only about 40 or 50 cents a gallon,” Simpson says, adding that today these costs have climbed to levels comparable to gasoline — $2 to $3 a gallon.
“The economics of those houses are not the same as when they were first built.”
Additionally, older houses, like most manmade structures, are prone to wear and tear, which, over time, often brings decreased energy efficiency.
Needless to say, most growers can’t afford to build entirely new houses. But applying information from poultryhouse.com, they can retrofit their houses to restore lost efficiency and, in turn, reduce operating costs.
“We’re doing everything we can to tighten up the house and reduce fuel consumption,” Simpson says.
What they obtain from the site is a working knowledge of how these houses can be tightened up and insulated — transforming them, as Simpson describes it, into “a self-contained environment where [they] can cater to the needs of the birds more consistently and uniformly.”
The end result: a better poultry product and more profit for growers.
Tightening up the house also helps more than the birds, he says. It can help contain other costs too. Propane costs are not the only factors that have gone sky high in recent years, Simpson says. Other factors include electricity and the costs of well operations and cooling systems. Even the costs of wood shavings used as litter on the floors of housing also have spiked in recent years — increases that stem from changes in the forestry industry.
In the case of the wood shavings, better insulating the house enables growers to reduce operating costs by extending the work life of these shavings.
Poultryhouse.com features newsletters, videos, books and publications — all of which offer straightforward, how-to approaches to improving poultry house efficiency.
Already recognized by growers as a premier source of poultry house information, the Web site generates traffic from all over the world. Some seventy percent of the traffic is from the 25 U.S. poultry-growing states, though close to 30 percent is international, Simpson says.
Posted by Jim Langcuster at April 18, 2008 08:21 AM