Record Keeping In The Brooder Barn

Record keeping is essential to making business decisions at MacFarlane Pheasants. In the brooder barns we record key information on a daily basis. There is a mortality sheet in each workroom. The workroom is a special room for sanitation right before the chick barn. Information recorded at the top of the mortality sheet includes the barn number, the number of chicks placed into the room and the hatch date.

Employees in each barn are required to fill in the following information, daily:

• date
• age of chicks in days
• current temperature
• fan settings
• light intensity
• number of dead chicks
• employee recording information
• additional notes to track anything out of the ordinary

When chicks move outside at seven weeks, the sheet is tallied and studied. We look at the number of chicks started, the number of dead chicks the crew recorded and then compare that information to the actual number of chicks moved out of the pens.

We record things like temperature, fan settings, and light intensity to double check our own procedures and to make sure we are doing everything perfectly to protect our chicks. Even under the best of circumstances, we lose some fragile young chicks. By knowing what our exact numbers are, after chicks are seven weeks old, we have an inventory of how many birds will be available for shipping, to fill our orders.

At the end of each season, we tally up the information from all of the barns to compare to previous years. This information is important to our business decisions for the next season. Brian Klein, our Brooder Barns Manager, can be contacted at b.klein@pheasant.com, if you have questions about our brooder barns..