The Year Round: Approaching peak time for our egg production

Our 30,000 poultry at White Smocks are approaching peak egg production. They are in three batches, each of 10,000 birds. These early stages entail much extra work as the new layers must be trained to use the nest boxes instead of dropping eggs on the floor.

Two of us walk the floors several times a day. Work is eased as the very small eggs that are laid to begin with are now few. Cockerels were rather over-active when first turned out but altering their rations has calmed them down.

The pig department is running smoothly. Litter numbers enable us to wean ten per sow and with 220 sows involved that makes a satisfactory output on our 74 acres. The weak currency is something we cannot control and we do not use home-grown cereals in our rations. A price for poultry feed was fixed in spring but one can never be sure how it will work out.

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With pig rations containing 15-18 per cent soya bean meal the price has been forecast to drop but is still around 265 per tonne.

We had some very heavy rains early this week and now need more sun to harvest the winter barley.

CW 24/7/10

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