By Adriano Bailos, consultant in Industrial Incubation, Automation and Hatchery Air Conditioning at Yamasa

With an extremely demanding production chain in search of better results and the highest quality of products, Brazilian poultry farming has increasingly demonstrated the need to work down to the smallest detail. Quickly and precisely finding the ideal point of action saves time and money and makes companies quickly perceive the positive return of the defined strategies or the corrective actions adopted.

A highly important step in this chain is industrial incubation, with ever-larger and more technological hatcheries, where small failures become big problems, and the margin for error gets smaller.

When we talk about precision poultry farming in the area of industrial incubation we are talking, for example, about knowing gram by gram what the real weight of each one is of the eggs that we are incubating, selling or discarding, to be sure that the incubated eggs are in the correct position and/or even predict how evenly chicks will be housed, as we know a chick`s body weight is very high. directly linked to the weight of the egg that originated it.

Classifying 100% of eggs by weight brings us a series of advantages, a good example is: at the beginning of production of the matrices. When birds start to lay hatchable eggs at 25 or 26 weeks of age there are still very small eggs being produced and it`s important to remember. It is necessary to make the separation of what is What is really hatchable and what will it be? discarded.

For this operation, an automatic weight classifier is required. It is highly effective, already   It is practically impossible to visually define whether an egg is 48, 49 or 50 grams, and it is completely impractical to manually weigh thousands of eggs. In this way, without the precision provided by the classifier, hatching eggs will be discarded and eggs smaller than the stipulated minimum weight will be incubated.

Other interesting technologies that an automatic classifier provides are the crack detector and the electronic ovoscopy that automatically remove cracked, dirty eggs and with content overflow. ;do, improving the sanitary condition of the lots to be incubated and/or sold in Brazil and abroad.

Speaking about precision, a new aspect that is very common in single-stage hatcheries is that of precision. incubation by thermal load, which consists of distributing the eggs inside the incubators taking into account their potential heat generation.

In this case, knowing the real weight of these eggs helps the incubator to define such positioning, as it is already known. that heat generation will basically depend on two parameters: average fertility and egg mass. Having these two pieces of information accurately is essential. It is possible to homogenize the generation of heat inside the incubator, reducing the hatching window and improving the quality of the birds.

The fact that the classifier has the necessary technology to correctly position the eggs with the air chamber upwards, reducing late embryonic mortality and improving the hatching, it is also a big plus. In the management area, we still have the possibility of a great improvement in operating costs with the reduction of approximately 50 to 60% of the employees needed in the classification of eggs.

Egg Uniformity at Slaughter

It is not valid. It is novelty that a batch of chickens with homogeneous weight starts with a batch of uniform chicks, which in turn come from uniform eggs, that is, the fact of weighing the eggs individually through a classification Automatic and categorizing before incubating is easy. the beginning of a chain that will culminate in In the most cost-sensitive area of the company, the slaughterhouse! According to the director of Agricultural and Industrial Production at Ad’oro S.A., Jair Sbaraini, currently the high level of automation of existing equipment in the production process of slaughter plants is configured to meet a certain carcass size with a pre-defined weight range. In this way, we must guarantee an ideal presentation of the products to meet the strict specifications of these equipment.

Thus, for a harmonic operation, a high level of uniformity of the raw material for slaughter is required. that the incidence of batch unevenness impairs the processing performance, reducing the efficiency of the machines, and impacting on other factors such as the well-being of the birds (humane slaughter), the integrity of the products and compliance with consumer specifications.

When we do not reach the necessary uniformity, the problems start right away. in the hanger, they go through the stunning stage, then at a lower incidence, but still to be considered, in the bleeding line. They continue in the scalding and plucking stages and in the evisceration line, increasing the incidence of inappropriate cuts.

In short, the more uniform the batches of poultry, the less the need for rework and the less condemnation or disqualification of products, optimizing the production process and the yield of the final products, resulting in a significant impact on the companies` efficiency and return on investment.