Between supply chain issues, increasing feed costs and ripple effects from the pandemic, keeping your poultry operation running efficiently can seem like a daunting task. Making changes can help streamline processes and cut costs, but making the wrong changes can cause costly, long-term effects to your operation. Below we offer five considerations for keeping your operation efficient—before changes are implemented.

1. Pay close attention to feed quality and feed additives.

From a feed cost perspective, probiotics and prebiotics are often the first to be removed when trying to reduce feed costs. While this may seem like a quick fix, it is important to consider that these products build up and filter out in the environment over time. Which means pulling them from your birds’ diets might not have immediate effects, but long-term consequences still remain. Ultimately, the effect of these cost-cutting measures in the diet often surface later in the shape of costly impacts on bird health. Monitoring feed quality and consistency can often provide quicker, more effective benefits than altering the overall diet. Paying close attention to pellet and ingredient quality, feed wastage and proper conditioning can help you make your feed budget work harder and more efficiently.

2. Keep up on the latest information.

New technologies, research and recommendations for nutrition and animal care are emerging every day. Keeping up to date on the latest information prepares you to respond quickly in an informed manner, allowing you to be prepared to implement new ideas and technologies when changes need to be made. Staying current on new processes and applications can help you identify ways to streamline your operation or reduce the chance of human error.

3. Talk to the experts first.

Rely on your technical experts and partners before deciding on when and where to make cuts. It’s part of their role to advise in tough situations and their expertise is key to keeping birds healthy during cost-cutting changes. You can always contact our team of nutritional innovators if you’re interested in making changes to your birds’ diets.

4. Good communication is key.

Individuals within an operation can have different metrics, priorities and considerations to determine success, which means there can be a variety of ideas and strategies to address challenges. By having open conversations whenever possible and prioritizing clear communication among all internal stakeholders, you can help make sure everyone is aligned—especially when discussing important topics and decisions.

5. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

With these considerations in mind, there’re many solutions to maintaining budgets. From complex to complex, it’s necessary to take a close look at each link in the production system to evaluate what will be most effective for your specific needs.

These five key considerations can assist you in making cost-cutting decisions and help keep your poultry operation efficient in the face of outside pressures.

For a more in-depth look at streamlining costs and the latest research, check out our recent Food Chain Chats episode with Dr. Kelley Wamsley on increasing efficiency in poultry production systems.