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| Chicken house footbath |
Block the bug before it bugs your flock!!
Biosecurity is a practice designed to
prevent the spread of disease onto your farm.
Biosecurity has three (3) major
components:
1. Isolation
2. Traffic control
3. Sanitation
Biosecurity 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 anyone 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 are
carried onto 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
diseases, but don't get affected and when brought nearer to our flocks, the
disease gets a chance of manifesting in our exotic 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
leftovers, and drink the same water with our birds, so they can easily transmit
diseases. Rat control include installation of rat baits in
and out of the farm and use of poison. Having a strong foundation that cannot
be penetrated by rats.
6. Inspect flocks daily and recognize disease symptoms:
The role of the manager at the farm
should also include making sure all biosecurity 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.
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. Diarrhoea (brown, bloody, etc.) are all caused by
dampness in the litter. Maintain the litter dry, and maintain fresh airflow.
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.
This
is where we will be ending our discussion for today.
You
are also encouraged to kindly share this information with your loved ones you
feel might benefit from it as we cannot reach everyone at the same time.
Thank you!!
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