Pullets take to life on the slats

When one of the country’s largest independent pullet rearers converted redundant laying houses to rearing accommodation, it decided to leave in the slatted floors.

As previously reported in the Ranger, Potters Poultry, a family business based in Warwickshire, has, after over 20 years, ceased producing eggs in order to concentrate on its expanding pullet rearing operation which now rears over one million birds annually.

Three poultry houses that once contained free range and barn layers now provide accommodation for 90,000 pullets. But rather than completely strip the sheds out to make way for a conventional floor rearing operation, only the nests were removed leaving the slatted floors intact.

The result, says company director, Olivia Potter, has meant customers benefiting from a seamless transfer of the birds to their new accommodation at 16 weeks.

“We supply some producers who, because of working with converted buildings themselves, have layouts where the birds have to negotiate quite high drops between levels,” says Olivia, who is a member of the BFREPA council. “Pullets that have got used to a raised floor in rear quickly feel at home in the laying house.”

Olivia told the Ranger that the stepped lighting system in the Potters’ ex-laying houses was also retained, and was now used to encourage the young pullets up onto the slats at night.

“Again this pays dividends with the move to the laying house and can save producers many hours lifting birds up onto the slats during the first week or so.”

Olivia has tried both starting the day-olds off on chick paper on the raised floor and then letting them down, via ramps, to the litter at 3 to 4 weeks of age, and brooding them on the litter floor first before letting them up onto the raised area.

“Both methods work equally well as far as developing the birds’ ability to move up and down the different levels,” she explains, “but if we are using the coccidiosis vaccine Paracox, we find it’s more effective if the young birds have access to litter first in order to ensure recycling of the vaccine.”

The houses are split 50/50 between slats and litter and feeders and drinkers can be found on both levels. Pullets are stocked as they would be in a fully littered building at 14 birds per sq metre which is within industry assurance scheme standards.

The converted houses have now completed three cycles and one customer who is pleased with the pullets out of them is Tony Cox, who manages a large egg production business for CA Powell.

The farm, near Bristol, has a total capacity for 75,000 layers, the majority of which are now free range as the business undergoes a switch away from cages. A variety of buildings are used to house the free range flocks, including one which has been adapted from a hay barn. With plenty of headroom available, the slats were positioned high enough to let machinery drive under at clean-out time. But this means the birds have a two-stage drop to get down to the litter.

“The first time we put birds in there it was a nightmare,” says Mr Cox. “We spent weeks and weeks lifting them back up on to the slats at the end of each day in an effort to train them.”

Mr Cox told the Ranger that the next batch of birds to go in the house were reared—albeit unintentionally—in one of Potters’ slatted rearing houses.

“The difference was incredible, and there was only one bird down on the litter at the end of the first day. We will definitely be requesting that type of rearing for all future flocks going in that house.”

Mr Cox has also seen a benefit from having slat-trained pullets in some of the farm’s other free range houses.

“We’ve got mobile houses where the nests are raised off the floor in order to maximise stocking of the slatted area.

“Floor eggs have been a problem in the past but for these pullets the jump up to the nest is nothing.”

So, with such satisfied customers, is Potters Poultry charging more for pullets reared in this way?

“The flocks out of those houses are the same cost to customers as they would be out of one of our floor rearing systems,” says Olivia. ”We can do it that way because it didn’t cost us to put the slats in.

“However, if we were to start converting existing floor rearing houses—which we will if there is sufficient demand—we would have to look at the finished cost of the pullet.

“Margins are a bit thin for pullet rearers and we would be talking about a considerable investment in additional equipment, so such a move would have to be market-led.

“But I believe this is how pullet rearing will develop in the future.”