Case study: Your broiler farm is experiencing a spike in broiler carcass rejects. (These birds are those that reach maturity, but after processing are rejected because of poor body condition, either due to disease or bodily damage e.g. bruises or sores.)
Whilst carcass rejects are a reality of broiler farming – some birds just won’t make the cut to reach your customer, still, you are mindful of the cost these losses place on your business.
Minimising rejects helps to optimise business profits. Even the slightest or seemingly marginal improvements can add significant cumulative benefit to your bottom line over multiple rearing cycles.
In the case of your broiler farm, your birds were getting rejected because of disease. But postmortem inspection at the processing plant proved inconclusive.
So, your broiler carcass rejection remained at around 3%. Without this issue, your target carcass rejection rate would be 0.5%, overall.
Due to a mysterious disease, your farm is incurring 6x the rejection rate.
And so, to stem the loss, you decide to invest in the services of a poultry veterinary consultant.
The consultant begins with a thorough examination of your rearing environment, equipment and flock behaviour.
The aim?
To identify the root cause (of the disease triggering the loss of some 2.5% of all carcass rejects at processing)
Once identified, the goal will be to nullify it and implement operational controls that prevent recurrences.
On investigation, the consultant took close inspection of all your rearing processes, but drew a blank on cause.
That was until he found this case study that opened his eyes to something he’d missed:
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