By Assaf Shafran
VP and General Manager, pHi-Tech
Phibro Animal Health
Look around you: Companies of all scales and from different industries are reshaping at a rapid pace. Thanks to the wide variety of digital innovations, new tools are constantly being developed and released to the market. These tools are adopted by organizations worldwide seeking to facilitate measurement and data-driven decision-making for optimizing process efficiency and maximizing productivity.
The same is happening in the global agriculture industry and the poultry-production sector, which is evolving quickly to meet the needs of the growing world population. The subsequent increasing demand for poultry protein is driving poultry-farm managers and veterinarians to look for new ways of coping with the tremendous challenge of supplying quality poultry products at affordable prices. Some estimates suggest that the demand for global poultry meat is likely to double in 2050 in comparison to 2005, whereas a 40% increase in chicken-egg consumption is also anticipated.
Furthermore, diminishing agriculture resources and increasing production costs are likely to influence the profitability of the entire poultry industry. In these challenging scenarios, poultry veterinarians and farm managers are expected to enhance productivity through the early detection, prediction and prevention of diseases.
Small margin of error
When it comes to poultry production, the margin of error is usually very small. With the advent of precision livestock-farming technology, farm managers and veterinarians can adopt an agile approach to flock management. By implementing new tools for risk analysis and taking prompt action, they can ensure optimal growing conditions for their flocks.
The use of digital technology at the farm level, which is a cornerstone of precision livestock farming, has been mainly focused on disease detection, feed-intake measurement and environmental-condition monitoring inside poultry houses. These technologies have led to the development of a new approach in the industry, enhancing real-time decision-making based on data outputs.
For example, by harnessing the advantages of big data, researchers can successfully predict the risk assessment of avian influenza, thus optimizing the poultry-vaccination process and overall farm productivity using the pHi-Tech vaccination system.
Evaluating the importance of vaccination against disease in flocks and how the vaccination process can be enhanced by using new technologies available on the market is inevitable in this age.
It is commonly agreed that vaccination is a key step in the poultry production chain to ensure optimal flock health and productivity. Vaccination is usually an expensive, laborious and time-consuming process; therefore, it requires special attention to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
Proper administration is key
The success of a flock-vaccination event is majorly influenced by the proper administration of vaccination in every injection. Since vaccine failure has dual implications, including increased production costs and elevated risk of disease outbreak, it should be meticulously monitored.
One of the major causes for inadequate antibody titers in flocks, as seen in post-vaccination serology tests, is due to human errors during the vaccination process.
The tough environmental conditions and the laborious process of manually injecting large flocks in short periods of time take their toll on the accuracy of the entire process. Operators get worn out quickly and can accidentally administer incomplete injections, not ensure the correct vaccine temperature, forget to replace the needle frequently, continue injecting from an empty vaccine bottle, inject in the wrong injection site and more — all of which can lead to inadequate antibody-titer development that fails to provide complete protection from diseases.
This leads us to the conclusion that optimization of the poultry-vaccination process is vital to ensure its success and safeguard flocks.
Using an automized vaccination system such as pHi-Tech not only provides real-time alerts for injection application errors, it also collects data during the entire process. Managers have access to comprehensive analytical reports and dashboards, providing them valuable insights from the vaccination process, without having to be there in person and closely monitor each operator. Decision-makers are given the ability, for the first time, to review, analyze and derive actionable measures for optimizing the vaccination process and overall farm productivity by using the pHi-Tech vaccination system. Remember, a vaccine is only as effective as the accuracy of its administration.
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