Poultry Bio-security

As the threat of Avian Influenza continues to increase globally and as Governments impose restrictions across avian industries, it is important as ever to understand how to increase your bio-security and protect your livelihood.

When we discuss bio-security, we are referring to the practices aimed at reducing and eliminating the transmission and spread of disease. Bio-security is an essential aspect of all agricultural industries and in this instance, it is the key factor in ensuring better poultry health and protection of your profits and livelihood.

Bio-security can be accomplished by adhering to strict and efficient bio-secure practices that eliminate the transmission of disease, viruses and bacteria amongst your birds.

Your bio-secure practices can be broken down into two simple ways of thinking:

1. Prevention – Preventing the introduction of new viruses, bacteria etc onto your farm/property
2. Protection – Protection from the spread of disease, viruses, bacteria etc amongst your livestock.

How you achieve both practices can be simplified and made part of everyday working practices on a farm, ensuring a bio-secure environment.

Prevention

• Ensure the poultry production area and housing areas have well established bio-secure zones with appropriate fencing that eliminates access from outside agencies such as wild birds or other animals.
• All workers should avoid contact with other farms/poultry premises.
• All workers should wear clean clothes and boots upon entering the premises and for visitors, new/clean boots should be provided.
• Sharing farming equipment for Poultry such as bird cages should be avoided, as some studies suggest that 90% of disease transmission is from farm-to-farm contact.
• Regular cleaning and disinfection of all poultry housing areas and preparation areas.

These are just a few simple tips that are often suggested to those within the poultry industry and the adherence to these procedures should aid in preventing the transmission of disease to your property.

Protection

In the event disease is transmitted to your farm it is essential to protect your healthy livestock from the infected, ensuring minimal loss to livestock.

• Make sure you are able to identify signs of infection of various diseases, this is the only way to ensure that you are able to safely and accurately identify those infected.
• Act quickly – your immediate and quick reaction is key in ensuring that minimal transmission can occur amongst livestock.
• Separate the healthy from the infected and ensure that both are housed in clean, bio-secure areas. Again this is to ensure minimal transmission from one housing zone to another.
• Ensure all staff change clothing and boots when moving between healthy and infected housing areas. Additionally, no items should be shared/used between the two zones.
• Disposing of fallen stock – this requires a quick and bio-secure solution. A Waste Spectrum incinerator can be used on site when needed. It is a 100% bio-secure method for safely disposing of animal waste such as infected fallen stock and eliminates the necessity to keep infected fallen stock on site whilst waiting to dispose of dead birds through other disposal methods that you might be working with that can be expensive and risk transmission to healthy stock when left unattended for too long.

Machines in our Volkan Range are some of the most frequently used across the poultry industry, varying in sizes depending on operation size they can be used for small holdings up to large broiler operations. As a quick, clean, cost-effective, and bio-secure method for animal waste and animal by-product disposal, incineration can protect your livestock and ultimately protect your livelihood.

As always, our advice is to keep up to date with local legislation and maintain strict bio-security measures however in the meantime our team of experts are always on hand to discuss your waste management needs.