In hot climates, free-range egg farming does have lots of challenges, the solution has been found to be a mobile housing unit.
The expansion in the sales of free-range eggs has made farmers to adopt poultry houses into free-range systems. Survey has shown that lots of farmers are using the mobile housing unit.
Mobile layer unit are invariably small, and portable houses that can be towed to any new location by a tractor. They vary in designs due to the commercial options of using solar power to run the lights as well as the feeding systems that provide a structure for chickens to perch and nest in.
Joining the other farmers on the adventure of adopting a free-range mobile unit farming system for your birds will place you on a trial and error learning process since there is less information available for you to learn from.
Advantages of mobile housing
-
Moving of birds
The number one importance of using mobile housing unit is the ability to rotate the birds around different vegetation. Thus helps birds to have access to fresh pasture. This also improves fertilization on the farm where the birds are allowed to graze since their manures are scattered everywhere on the farms.
-
Reduction of parasite burden
With regular pasture rotations comes a significant reduction in the parasite load on soils, since the pasture burden and nutrient accumulated in the soil can become bad in a permanent building than a mobile housing system.
-
Consumer’s popularity
Knowing the benefit derived from birds gotten from mobile housing systems, consumers most flock to these kinds of chickens. And this has increased the market value of these poultry birds.
-
Guardian dogs will be used effectively
Using guardian dogs for mobile layer units has been proven to be a better and efficient way of keeping the birds safe as compared to the fixed houses used in our farms.
Disadvantages of mobile housing
-
Warmth stress
Numerous mobile housing units don’t have any ecological control frameworks, making them helpless against climatic boundaries. Warmth stress is a significant test for unfenced laying hens and broilers, and is the second-most elevated reason for mortality after predation.
For hens housed in mobile units without atmosphere control, withdrawing into the house can’t give help from the warmth as the indoor stocking thickness doesn’t give the space expected to the hens to disperse heat.
Frequently they should depend on wellsprings of shade on the range, for example, trees, fake structures, and underneath the portable house.
Giving cool drinking water during high temperatures is additionally a test in mobile housing. For mobile housing units that utilization little tanks or vast water sources, for example, chime or trough consumers, the water can warm up during blistering climate and compound the warmth stress experienced by the hens.
Cool drinking water is imperative for enhancing heat pressure, and setting the consumers and water tanks in the shade and normally flushing the water lines can assist with diminishing the warmth load on the herd.
-
Benefiting from the range is a biosecurity chance
Numerous versatile mobile housing units place their feed source out on the range, in open-get to troughs or dish feeders. This training is utilized because of an absence of room inside the housing unit, or to energize the hens out onto the range. Benefiting from the range pulls in wild fowls and rodents to the region, which presents an expanded hazard to biosecurity and infection control.
-
Extra work
Numerous mobile housing units require manual egg assortment, either by gathering the eggs from the homes by hand, or by pressing the eggs from an egg transport into a plate. Also, the versatile mobile housing units must be consistently moved to a new field, despite the fact that the recurrence of this will be reliant on the season and field quality on each ranch.
Moving the layer house will include getting together the hardware related to the house, for example, feeders, consumers and fencing, towing the unit to a new field, and afterward setting up the entirety of the gear once more.
Regardless of whether this extra work is viewed as an issue or simply some portion of the activity will clearly rely upon singular makers’ mentalities and their extra outstanding tasks at hand.
-
Expanded death rate
A few examinations have detailed higher death rates and less fortunate foot wellbeing in versatile mobile housing units, albeit, in a certain investigation, the versatile mobile units had an absolute death pace of 5.6 percent contrasted with the death rate in fixed unfenced places of 4.4 percent. The potential explanations behind this inconsistency were not talked about.
Conclusion
All in all, there are preferences and detriments to utilizing mobile housing units in the poultry farm. The fundamental points of interest identifies with the improved field quality that the hens approach while running.
The principle challenges identify with the climatic limits experienced under certain conditions, and it is indispensable that warmth stress is overseen accurately in such housing units.
With the expanding ubiquity of mobile housing units, more research is expected to decide the best-practice activity of these frameworks to guarantee proficient creation and ideal chicken farming assistance.
[…] Tagiri extract also known as Christmas Melon has the potential of preventing and controlling deadly poultry diseases. It is one of the natural defenses that should be put in place whenever farmers resort to organic form of poultry farming. […]
[…] However, traditionally, the bitter leaf has been found to be very effective in the treatment of Coccidiosis. Therefore, farmers whose system of rearing chicken is the intensive system ought to make good use of these natural herbs for the benefits of his birds. […]
[…] families consider free-range farming? should they change their opinion about only rearing chickens for subsistence […]