How to Raise Meat Chickens for a Faster Harvest
Raising meat chickens? Shorten time to harvest with smart feed storage, a 23-hour lighting schedule, better feeders and well-placed drinkers.
Broiler chicken farming is one of the fastest livestock businesses to reach harvest, and it delivers a steady stream of profit. But if you want to shorten your birds' time to harvest even further, here is what you can do.
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How You Store Chicken Feed
Giving your chickens quality feed is one way to improve the quality of the meat your farm produces. But choosing the right feed alone is no guarantee. Besides checking the nutritional content of your feed, pay attention to where you store it. Avoid hot spots when storing feed for your chickens.
Hot weather creates humidity inside a feed storage area, and that is bad for feed quality. Hot, humid areas make it easy for mold to grow on chicken feed. Moldy feed is poor in quality and can of course be toxic to your flock. So if you want your chickens to grow faster, make sure your feed storage area is secure and has minimal risk of mold growth.
Also read Meat Chicken Farming Techniques for Beginners
Use the Lights-Off, Lights-On Technique
One technique that can help shorten the time to harvest is the lights-off, lights-on method. It works by giving your chickens a lighting schedule: the lights are switched off for 1 hour and kept on for 23 hours. Why does this matter? This technique helps speed up the chickens' digestion. During the dark period, feed is absorbed faster and more completely by the body, so the nutrients in the feed are put to better use. That is what helps the chickens grow faster.
Choose the Right Feeders
Another thing you should know about getting the most out of chicken feed, and in turn speeding up growth, is to use quality feeders. Good feeders minimize the amount of feed that goes to waste. If less feed is wasted, each ration does more for the birds' growth, right? So don't just go by how cheap a feeder is. Cheap feeders tend to let more feed spill out and go to waste.
Where to Place Drinkers
Another thing to keep in mind if you want your chickens ready for harvest sooner is to place drinkers a good distance from the feeders. Drinkers placed too close can let water get into the feed, making it spoil faster. As mentioned earlier, spoiled, low-quality feed slows chickens' growth because it is unhealthy and toxic.
Also read How to Raise Bangkok Chickens
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, the way to support growth on your farm is to pay closer attention to nutrition and how well your chickens absorb their feed. Beyond the points above, make sure the coop is kept clean and healthy. Coop hygiene and health also play an important role in chickens' growth, so keeping the coop clean can also shorten your flock's time to harvest. As we know, broiler chickens are a genetically engineered breed. When they are healthy, they grow very quickly. In fact, you can start earning money from raising chickens when they are as young as 6 weeks old.
