Hatchery
Phoenix poultry is a breeding operation and as such as a breeder. We produce and sell day old chicks. These chicks can survive for 72 hours without food and water and so they can be send from hatchery to any part of the country if properly packed and protected in ventilated boxes. We produce both layer and broiler chicks. Egg producers buy layer chicks and broiler chicks are bought by broiler farmers who rear these chicks and sell them for table purposes.
Breeding involves producing and rearing males and females of parent flock. The parent flock is the last link in the chain of hybridization that takes place at great grand parent, grand parent and parent level. Before these level is the pure line breeding stage. All this is very scientific and mathematical. Exceptionally high degree of genetic uniformity is achieved in the process. The end result is a hybrid chick that has highest genetic potential in terms of following traits
• High liveability
• Early maturity, low body weight, high egg laying, strong shell, large egg and low feed consumption in laying birds.
• Early fast growth, good liveability, good breeds configuration, high meat. , high body weight with good food conversion ratio.
We buy parent flocks form Venkateshwara Hatchery Limited. It is Pune, Maharashtra, India based. It has two pure line projects which are pride and joy of the Indian poultry industry. It is one of the very few successful pure line breeding operation outside USA. The males of parent flock have a different genetic make up and female has different make up. They are crossed at our breeding farms to produce a high quality fertile hatching eggs that will be hatched to produce a chick with the highest genetic potential.
The fertile eggs and cleaned fumigated and cooled. Then they are loaded on to machines called setter (Incubators) where they remain in controlled atmosphere for 18 days. They are transferred to hatcher machine where they remain for 3 days where the chicks pip out from the eggs. In nature it takes 21 days for the chick come out of the eggs as hatch. It takes the sometime for eggs to hatch in machine. In nature hen sits on eggs to hatch then it can hatch about 8-10 eggs at a time. Our machines do the same job but in huge quantities. One single machine can have 14000 to 90000 eggs in it and at a time in hatchery there may be more than 50,00,000 eggs in various stages of incubation.
Chicks are than pulled out, inspected, culled, vaccinated, counted, packed and dispatched. They are packed in card board boxes with holes in them and they are sent by open vans.
It is a very scientific and precise process with at most care given to hygiene. In the hatchery the aim is to maintain as high a level of cleanliness as would be desirable in operation theatres.