1. Temperature in the brooder
To provide temperature for 1-21 year old chicks, attention should be paid to the construction and preparation of the barn. The barn must ensure that the winter is warm and cool.
When winter comes, the place to “raise newly hatched chicks” must be carefully shielded, ensuring heat retention and no drafts causing heat loss. To do so, it is necessary to have a separate brooding room and use a round barrel with a height of 50-70cm. Using an open electric bulb with a capacity of 250-500W, each bulb is enough to heat 100 newly hatched chickens; on the barrel surface covered to retain heat. It is also possible to heat with a stove (electric or coal). To prevent chicken from being burned, you need to make an iron bow like a fish bow, and then put it on the stove.
With the naked eye, we can tell if the chicken coop temperature is insufficient, sufficient or excess. If the heat in the coop is sufficiently humid, we see the chickens walking comfortably or lying evenly in the coop, in the coop. If there is a lack of heat, the chickens will get cold and lie around the fireplace or right under the light and are afraid to walk, refuse to eat. If the chicken is too cold or has diarrhea, the loose stools are white in color. If the chicken is too hot, the chickens will disperse away from the heat source, open their beaks, breathe heavily and drink a lot of water (note that when using a charcoal stove or rice husk stove to heat the chickens, there must be a collector to carry toxic gases out of the coop).
2. Feed the chickens properly
For laying hens, we need to feed the chickens freely, that is, there must always be food in the feeder. However, the amount of feed in the day must be divided into several feedings and between each feeding there must be a short time of food shortage so that the chickens can eat the troughs clean, limiting the old food remaining in the trough for a long time. eat. In our country’s climate, farms usually feed chickens twice a day, early in the morning and when it’s cool. However, during seasons with low temperature and peak laying hens, we need to feed chickens 3 times a day to stimulate chickens to eat more to meet peak production needs (first time: early morning, 2nd time: at noon, 3rd time: in the evening).
3. Deworming for laying hens
The rate of chicken helminth infection is very high, especially in the flocks reared in the background. Worms rarely kill chickens, but they will reduce productivity, consume high feed, cause digestive disorders, and create conditions for other diseases to break out. For laying hens that need periodic morning deworming, it can be done for the first time at 2 months before laying hens, then every 3 months. Attention should be paid to only using dewormers with high safety, low toxicity to chickens and little effect on egg production.
4. Factors that cause chickens to reduce reproduction
If we can find the cause of reduced laying hens as soon as they occur, the intervention will be simpler and the damage will be less. In fact, if we follow the chickens carefully, we can also distinguish fundamentally the difference between the two groups of causes of reduced laying as follows:
Decreased laying due to poor quality feed or insufficient feeding: reduced laying hens accompanied by an increase in the percentage of small eggs, the whole flock is healthy, eating normally, sometimes accompanied by pecking. When adjusting the feed, within 1-2 weeks egg production will recover.
Reduced laying due to diseases and environment: the whole herd showed a decrease in feeding, the number of eggs decreased but the percentage of small eggs did not increase much, eggs had strange colors, blood stains, .. When improving the environment and using the right drugs, With treatment, egg production will recover for a long time (sometimes lasting up to 15 days).
However, in order to quickly recover the egg production of chickens, we should combine several interventions at the same time, such as adjusting the feed, combined with increasing ventilation, increasing cooling of the farm, supplementing Add vitamins to help chickens increase disease resistance.
