Does the Source of Chicks have an Impact on Performance of Birds within Organic Table Bird Production Systems ?
Sheepdrove Organic Farm wanted to know whether the source of day old chicks and brooding and production period would have an impact on their enterprise. Sheepdrove Organic Farm wanted to know whether the source of day old chicks and brooding and production period would have an impact on their enterprise. An experiment was undertaken using two different sources of day old chicks and on two sites. 1000 day old chicks from Maurice Millard were exchanged with 1000 organic chicks from Devon Foods. These chicks were then put through the Sheepdrove (SOF) and Devon Foods Bradbury Barton (BB) organic production systems and weighed every week until depletion. The two systems were not identical and there were slight variations between the SOF and BB systems. BB had 500 bird flocks compared to SOFs 1000, BB had a brooding period of four weeks to SOFs three and BB total production period was 11 weeks to SOFs 10 weeks. There is no significant difference between the performances of the birds from the
