Maintaining the quality of drinking water for poultry is an important nutritional aspect, as poultry consume twice as much water as they do feed levels. At the same time, various factors such as the microbial level, pH, mineral content, hardness or organic load of the water in the drinking system have an impact on determining the quality of the water, so the key to ensuring water quality is to ensure that each of its factors should be within acceptable limits.
In many cases where egg farms have poor performance or health-related problems with some of their hens for no apparent other reason, then these problems are often related to drinking water.
In egg farms with A-type battery chicken cages and H-type battery cages, closed drinking systems were installed, and the configuration rate of nipple drinking systems reached 100%. In single-block houses with a rearing scale of 10,000 hens or more, most of the closed drinking systems are equipped with a full closed drinking system, and the water source is mostly tap water or deep well water. Chicken coops with a single rearing capacity of less than 10,000 birds mostly use filtration devices, drinking water line tanks, nipple drinking lines, and drinking nipples.
The height of the nipple waterer has an obvious effect on the amount of water that the hen drinks. Too high or too low will lead to a decrease in the amount of water that the hen drinks, resulting in a decrease in the amount of food consumed and affecting its health and production performance. This requires that the height of the drinking line in the rearing cage should be adjusted in time to ensure that the hens can drink comfortably.
The amount of water that a hen needs to drink depends on the amount of food intake, the feed component, the temperature of the henhouse and the age of the hen. In general, after 10 days of age, a hen needs 1.8 times more water than her feed intake, i.e. 200 ml of water per day. If the ambient temperature in the henhouse reaches 32°C, the water intake of the laying hens will increase significantly. It is also necessary to pay attention to this phenomenon in the management of the drinking water system to ensure the normal and effective operation of the drinking water system, to control the environmental temperature of the henhouse and to reduce the occurrence of the phenomenon of overload in the operation of the drinking water system due to abnormal ambient temperature.
Suggestions for the management of nodes for the efficient use of the egg drinking water system
The quality of drinking water is one of the keys to ensure that hens can maximize their genetic potential and stable and efficient production performance.
The benchmark concerns to ensure the quality of drinking water for hens are:
(1) water source;
(2) filters should be installed at the front of the water line;
(3) water disinfection;
(4) regular cleaning and disinfection of the drinking water system.
For egg farm technicians, to achieve nodal management for the efficient use of the egg drinking water system, in addition to the four aspects mentioned above as benchmark concerns, further refinement of the drinking water system management is required, summarized as follows:
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Post time: May-31-2023
