Poultry records: Everything you need to know

Poultry record keeping is an essential part of poultry farming. Through poultry records a farmer can track the performance of their flocks and determine the financial viability of their farm.

Poultry farming can only be inefficient and ineffective if you do not keep poultry records. Without any records, you are apt to do guesswork when it comes to determining the productivity of your flocks. Furthermore, you have no way to determine the financial viability of your farm. You could be losing every penny without being the wiser.

Why keep flock records

Essentially, flock records enable you to log and track key performance indicators in about your flock. Right off the bat, flock records enable you to answer questions such as:

• How old is my flock?
• What has been the financial returns from this flock?
• How much have I spent on this flock?
• What is the egg production rate of this flock, today, last week, last month?
• Is this flock performing better or worse than another?
• How many birds have died in this flock so far?
• Is this flock living up to the breed’s performance benchmarks?
• How profitable is my poultry farm?
• And so on..

Poultry records data

Whether you recognize it or not, you are already keeping poultry records. Even if not yet on paper, or some app, for sure you’re mentally keeping track of certain things about your flock.

For commercial farmers, poultry records are an essential part of your farm. Notably, logging and tracking certain flock performance indicators can give you a better understanding of your chicken. Moreover, such records are not only useful in tracking your flock’s performance, they can also be kept for future reference.

There are at least 4 aspects that you should log and track in your poultry records:

• Mortality and liveability
• Finances: sales and expenses
• Egg production and production rate
• Bird weight
• Vaccination administration

Essential features for poultry records app or software

If you’re a small scale or backyard poultry farmer, you could manage without records. That is, if you have a few chicken and can more or less keep the few but essential records on paper.

Using dedicated poultry record apps or software has a number of benefits. Essentially, they should make flock management and farm management tasks efficient.

An effective poultry records app should have the following features out-of-the-box:

• Coop management
• Flock management
• Poultry schedule management
• Others e.g.
  • Flock feeding management
  • Bird weight management
  • Farmhands management
  • Feed conversion ratio calculations

How to keep flock records

There are several poultry record keeping apps available on App Store, Play Store. Additionally, there are online tools and dedicated poultry records keeping software. Furthermore, you can find simple poultry record keeping cards, printouts and books from places like Etsy.

However, not all software and apps are not created equal so we recommend some diligence in picking a record keeping tool based on your farm data needs.

Benefits of keeping poultry records

If you really want to log and track key performance indicators on your flock, you’ve to keep poultry records.

Even more so if you are a commercial farmer, and want to have an in depth understanding of your farm. Moreover, if you want to practice data based farming, poultry records are essential part of that.

Here are a number of benefits you can accrue from keeping farm records:

• Effective bookkeeping for poultry farm
• Layer and broiler farm management
• Broiler flock management
• Farm records management
• Track and understand flock performance over time
• Compare flock performance against
  • Other flocks
  • Breed benchmarks
  • Flock-supplier benchmarks
  • Other farmers’ flocks
• Determine the profitability of your poultry farm
• Keep a flock history for future reference
• Practice data based poultry farming
• Share farm records with co-farmers