It’s hard to believe, but we’re in the final preparation stage for our new season (producing ringnecks for sale as mature birds for the fall of 2010). On Tuesday March 7th (just over two weeks from today) we bring our first batch of 7,000+ day old ringneck chicks to the farm. Troy Cisewski (our brooder manager) and his crew have been busy cleaning, disinfecting and setting up the brooder barns. Just as an example, Troy’s crew disassembled the entire automatic feed system in the “A” rooms as there was concern that perhaps some sort of organism could persist inside the tubes and corners.
The schedule that has been arranged for chicks coming to our farm this year is unrelenting. From an economic viewpoint we need to make our brooder facilities efficient – one reason for the “unrelenting” aspect is that like all pheasant farms, we only are hatching ringnecks for ½ of the year. In 2010 – we plan on bringing 250,000+ pheasant chicks to the farm (and this is not counting the chukar partridges we start too) – and all of the responsibility for these chicks is turned over to Troy and his crew.
The brooder area in a commercial gamebird farm is probably the most stressful of any on employees. In the hatchery – if there is a “bad” hatch (i.e. lower %, etc.) at the end of the day, the hatch is over and you are onto the next week. But in the brooder barns – if there is an issue (e.g. chicks getting sick) the crew has to live with the problem until it gets corrected. There are alarms at night and if the weather turns bad and the pen crew can’t empty the brooder barns on the prearranged schedule (cause you can’t move out 6 week birds unless you have a 3 day window of good weather), then the brooder crew gets caught with “turning around” the “A” and “B” rooms on a very short timeframe.
One of the most important things that has happened is that our entire 2009 brooder crew (Troy, Prescott Lawrence, Marie Zanton and Derrick Golz) are here for the 2010 season. For our farm as a whole, we have had limited turn-over of employees over the past 20 years. But in the brooder crew area – over the past 5+ years, we have had a revolving door of sorts in employees. I am so happy to have our entire 2009 crew here – I believe that fact alone will be a big boost to us having a great 2010 brooder season.
