What is production overlap?
Poultry production overlap is when you overcome any single flock production gaps by rearing multiple flocks, at predefined intervals of purchase.
By rearing multiple flocks, your farm can smooth out expected dips in production with a consistent flow of output.
Why is production overlap important?
Business continuity.
Keeping your farm business in continual cash flow and profit means your productivity must be constant.
Breaks in production bring a stall in sales revenue and cash flow.
During this period of financial leanness, your poultry farm will most probably still incur fixed costs like:
- land charges
- utility fees
- local authority taxes
…and more.
To ensure that you don’t find yourself becoming unstuck with insufficient funds on hand to pay –
- practice financial prudence
- practice production overlapping.
Financial prudence
Financial prudence will help you save during the times of harvest,
To ride out the lean periods.
Production overlapping
Production overlapping will help you align your poultry batch purchases in a way that never allows for a break in production.
You buy batches of birds more frequently, which raises your variable costs of sale,
But you also have a continual ‘conveyor belt’ of eggs or carcasses ready for market.
(Without break.)
More frequent service of customers.
Continuous cash flow.
Best practice
Scenario plan
Before settling for any one type of production model,
Try laying out a few different scenarios to see which would lead to the ideal volume and frequency of farming output.
Consider the benefit vs. cost of each production profile and select the most advantageous one.
Further reading: What is scenario planning and how to use it (SME Strategy)
Cleaning period
Don’t forget when piecing together periods of production between flocks that you’ll need to account for some downtime to clean the houses.
Thorough cleansing should occur between flocks for biosecurity.
Also, time allowance should be made for the houses to sit unoccupied before receiving a new flock.
The recommended time period is about 2 weeks (inclusive of time to deep clean).
Schedule your market days
Overlapping the production of your poultry flocks gives you an uninterrupted flow broiler carcasses or meat.
You should be able to schedule firm diary dates of when another batch is due for delivery.
This adds a smoothing out effect to sales and business cash flow.
This level of production efficiency would not otherwise be possible rearing a single flock.
