By James Mottershead, chair, NFU poultry board
It won’t be a surprise to hear that water has been a big focus for the NFU and its Boards this summer. I was delighted to attend the NFU’s first ever water summit in Rishworth, at our Vice-president Rachel Hallos’ farm. The summit brought together more than 60 representatives and interested parties from across the water industry. The NFU hosted the summit to help facilitate discussions on both water availability and quality.
It was a really productive day. As I drove back home, I felt positive that we have a good story to tell. But we know this issue isn’t likely to fall from the media agenda any time soon, especially with various poultry infrastructure projects in development. With that in mind, we need to make sure we aren’t giving activists any reason to target our sector but show that we are taking this issue seriously and playing our part in water management.
I therefore encourage you all to look at your farm businesses and ask yourself, objectively, if you are doing all you can to be responsible users of poultry litter. I know most of us are already operating responsibly but I do believe there are always things we can review, and I have committed myself to do the same.
I also thought I’d give a quick update on the farm back home. I hope my fellow poultry producers who also have arable enterprises have not been too badly affected by the dry weather. We were able to finish our harvest in record time and we completed by the 14th August. Yields have been average although I know for others it has been a different story.
I am currently sat in between thinning and clearance. Bird performance this crop has been phenomenal – this is our third crop under our new Gumboro vaccination strategy, which is really starting to pay dividends.
I am also on my third crop of using a new feed additive supplied by our vets. This is supplied to the feed mill and added directly into the feed, which means we are now using the feed rather than the water to do the hard work to enhance the birds’ guts. While before I had to put multiple products into our water system to keep the drinker lines clean, now we are using chlorine dioxide as the main in crop water cleaner, as well as using short chain fatty acids. This has completely turbo charged the cleaning of the water lines in crop while the feed does the hard work in keeping the gut streamlined and performance where we need it to be.
Next crop I will spice things up even more by switching coccidiostats in line with dietary changes and this might be something I can update you on in the future.