Poultry - Case study
Unless Farm Health Planning is good, success is far from guaranteed on a Worcestershire game farm
Paul Jeavons is proprietor of Worcestershire Game Farm, a medium-sized enterprise producing pheasants and partridges each summer for re-stocking shoots.
Gamebirds are susceptible to a wide range of diseases and being near-wild rather than domesticated, can also suffer welfare problems arising from bird-on-bird aggression. This makes preventive Farm Health Planning particularly important.
“My approach is to improve each year,” says Paul. “Learning all I can from the previous season is crucial.”
In September each year, once the birds he has reared have left the farm, Paul summarises on paper all the egg-production, hatching and rearing statistics for the season just passed and every disease or welfare event he has experienced that year. In winter he invites his veterinary practice, Minster Vets, who specialise in gamebirds, to go through everything with him and to work out a health plan for the coming year.
Avoiding cross contamination
Changes might include improvements to housing, a new incinerator, a rethink of the vaccination regime or something as simple as a better way of liaising with customers. One practical example a few years back was a decision to equip the staff with different coloured wellies for different parts of the farm to avoid cross-contamination and to make sure at a glance that everyone was in the correct protective clothing for the area concerned.
“Having your hens healthy before they go into lay is also hugely important,” explains Paul. He routinely vaccinates by combined injection and live-water follow up for infectious bronchitis, egg drop syndrome, micoplasma and Newcastle disease. All the hens are also wormed.
The laying birds are a retained flock, rather than caught up from local shoots, while the laying field itself and the rearing pens are rotated to new grass each year, with sheep grazing the ‘fallow’ in between.
Recording and tracing
“Biosecurity is about reducing risk of contamination, “ believes Paul. “I have different staff to collect eggs and run the hatcheries. All my own eggs go through one hatchery and any bought in eggs through another so they are kept separate throughout. Everything is recorded and traceable, so if we get a problem we know at once where it started and when. That in turn helps us to treat it correctly and stop it happening again.”
Swabs are taken weekly in the hatchery and analysed by Minster Vets, and during rearing too, a sample of birds is regularly culled for analysis. Intervention if there is a disease problem or an advent of harmful aggressive behaviour is immediate. Once again, records are kept for future reference and feedback.
Good liaison with the customer is the final link in the chain and Paul follows the Game Farmer’s Association best practice advice on this to the letter. The gamekeepers who take his birds on are all encouraged to have the same drinkers and feeders ready, with the same ration, so there is no check in food consumption coincident with what could be, especially in poor weather, a stressful move to the shoot. Each delivery is accompanied by a full record of any drugs used on the birds, with an explanation of when and why treatment was given.
Changing attitudes
“Attitudes are changing throughout the game industry,” says Paul. “Our drug record sheets used to be greeted by customers with a shrug and a comment like ‘Oh, I see they’ve been ill then’. Now the gamekeepers want to know everything, understand the importance of prevention and rapid treatment. They effectively do their own Farm Health Planning for the final stages of the birds release into the wild.”
Gamebird farming is a fickle, seasonal business and unless Farm Health Planning is good, success is far from guaranteed. Shrewd game farmers have known this for years but there is an increasing and welcome tendency to write things down, liaise better with vets and work on preventive management rather than just coping with problems once they occur.
Page last modified:
September 28, 2007
Page published: 17 May 2007