Little Help From My Friends NEW FEED FORMULATION GIVEN TO SELECTED MANOK PINOY HENS By Manny Pinol There is something magical and beautiful in being in the farm and doing the work yourself. It is like being in a laboratory where actual daily tests and experiments are made with the results unfolding before your very eyes. A chicken which closes its eyes and appears sleepy perched on its roost early in the morning could either have an undigested food in the crop or respiratory ailment. What needs to be done is to catch the chicken and validate the visual observation. When the Longkong Lanzones which is supposed to bear seedless fruits produce fruits with a few seeds inside it, it is an indication that a cross pollination from a native lanzones tree occurred during the fruiting season. To confirm this, all that a farmer needs to do is to look around for the non-Longkong trees which are the sources of the unwanted pollen. Last week, I noticed a reduction in our egg production in the breeding yards where we have about 500 hens in the free range. Our daily egg production has already reached 200 eggs per day about a month ago. But this dropped to about 150 and a few hens in some yards stopped producing eggs. This was when I decided to conduct an actual and very expensive experiment. I ordered the farm workers to slaughter some of the hens which stopped producing eggs to determine what was wrong. What we discovered gave us an accurate assessment of the problem. The slaughtered hens had a lot of undeveloped eggs inside their bodies but these were covered by thick yellow fats. This was an indication that there was something wrong with the feeds we were giving them resulting in the development of fats in their bodies. After this discovery, I sought the help of a Facebook friend who is an expert in feed formulation, Ronald Tavita, and asked him to help me formulate a feed mix which would reduce fats in the hens and give them more energy to produce more eggs. Ronald, who is based in Metro Manila and does feed formulation for many commercial poultry farms, gave me a feed mix which is composed mainly of locally available feed materials, including Ipil-ipil leaves. Starting next week, I will use this feed formulation in several yards and compare the performance of the selected hens to those given the usual feeds. In two weeks to a month, I will be able to determine whether the new formula would improve the egg laying of the Manok PiNoy hens. So until that day, I will wake up every morning of each farming day with excitement and expectation and this is what makes life in the farm beautiful and magical.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:35:44 +0000
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