Bart Janssen: experience with on-farm hatching system

During the three-day congress at the VIV-Europe 2022, aviNews International had the great opportunity to interview different poultry experts with experience in diverse fields or areas in the industry. This note introduces you to the interview with Bart Janssen, a Netherlands broiler grower. The interviews were developed by Ad Bal, the editor of aviNews International, who has more than 20 years of experience as an editor in de poultry sector. Bart is growing his broilers with the on-farm hatching system. Bart explained that they have a broiler farm of 500,000 broilers. They manage two ages and two locations, making it work very efficiently. He indicated that farms are close to each other and have a heating system on wood chips that he considers very efficient since they only need one system for all farms. The company decided to switch to the on-farm hatching system on 2010 after Bart visited some research farms on this topic. He could see the positive effects of on-farm hatching on the birds performance and health. After that, on 2015, the company had the opportunity to build a new poultry house “to find out whether the system would be useful.” In that way, they could directly observe the effects on the management, bird development, chicken quality, etc. Bart said that they found that birds raised under the on-farm hatching system “were always ahead of the others” in terms of:

Health
Drier houses
Less use of antibiotics
A better feed conversion ratio

After these impressive results, they decided to implement the on-farm hatching system on [register] the whole farms, working so hard to achieve that in 2017, 2018, and 2019. “On-farm hatching truly demands tight management. It is a comprehensive approach and not just one element to improve”. “However, it makes us more flexible and is an efficient and profitable way of running our business. The next step will be receiving the incubated eggs on day 19. That will make on-farm hatching even more beneficial. Make your own calculation: 500.000 birds times 1 day gain, times 7,5 growing cycles per year…