What to remember on rearing chicken

Advise on;
-the structures required, feeds, disease management, best breed, and the general challenges expected.

For housing, consider floor spacing of 25 chicks per meter square, 10 growers per meter square, and four adult birds per meter square to guide you on the size for easy movement, exercise, food and water access.

Consider adequate lighting conditions by placing runs in a way that allows the birds to go out, but within a fenced confinement or translucent roofing for every 100 birds in the case of total confinement of birds.

For ample ventilation, the house should be rectangular (easy circulation of air) and by having one side of the house half-way open and covered by shade net or wire-mesh of small gauge (chick size).

Use building materials that are easy to clean and disinfect. Depending on resource availability, the housing may be concrete or wooden. As for the breed, for production purposes, consider improved indigenous birds (ranging from KARI improved, Kuroiler or Rainbow Rooster) since these are dual-purpose birds (males for meat and females for both eggs and meat) with performance that is on average higher than the unimproved indigenous chicken.

However, keeping the improved Kienyeji requires proper management conditions to complement the good genetics in the birds.

Depending on your production objective, the feeding regime and requirement will vary. If birds are being produced for meat at 4-6 months, provide chick mash for the first 2 months of life then change their diet to growers mash from the 3 to 4 or 6 month of age, depending on the market weight.

If birds are for egg production, feeding will involve chick mash (0-2 months), growers mash (2-5 months) and layers mash (5 months onwards).

It is important to note that when dealing with the improved indigenous parts, most of them tend to put on a lot of weight and this may negatively affect persistency in egg production and as such, avoid over-feeding during the growers period or consider a semi-intensive system.

Disease management involves high standard hygiene and vaccination against economically important diseases such as NCD (1st and 3rd week) IBD (2nd and 4th week), fowl typhoid (9th week) and fowl pox (18th week) to ensure disease prevention. If birds are under scavenging conditions, deworm after every three months while sick birds have to be isolated from the healthy ones to control spread of diseases.
If you are a beginner, consider starting small and learn from the experience.

Source: Daily Nation
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