‘Broilers are great fun, but sick broilers are a disaster’
Erik Weel has a broiler farm in the province of North Holland in the Netherlands. A real family business with two poultry houses containing 150,000 broilers each. To keep the birds healthy, they started using in ovo vaccination a long time ago. Together with veterinarian Kristof Van Mullem, he discusses the effects of this vaccination method.
Kristof Van Mullem: ‘At the end of the day, this is very profitable for a poultry farmer.’
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Erik: ‘If you keep broilers, you know you could get Gumboro problems one day. And so we did. This requires a lot of labour input, which is scarce at the moment. Just take 3,000 chickens out of your poultry house with an average weight of 2kg. Not a fun job and bad for your back and arms. Above all, you want healthy birds. My vet pointed me to in ovo vaccination. Because we want to continue innovating, we took up the challenge and to this day without regrets.’ Kristof: ‘What we see and hear in the field is that companies that vaccinate in ovo with Innovax have no or hardly any Gumboro and NCD problems. In addition, poultry farmers tell us that the rejection rate at processing is dropping. At the end of the day, this is very profitable for a poultry farmer.’ Erik: ‘The production can be planned better with in ovo vaccination. After on-farm hatching, we vaccinate against IB on day 0, so we then have completely vaccinated chicks that can start growing immediately.’ Protection against three diseases and lower rejection rate Kristof: ‘The big advantage of in ovo vaccination is that you prevent three diseases with one action at the hatchery.
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