PHOTO: HENK RISWICK
FARM REPORT ▶▶▶
Young poultry farmer, dwarf parent stock
Over 30 Dutch poultry farms work with Hubbard JA57 and JA87 parent stock. Melvin Hazeleger (22) has considerable experience with these dwarf females. He noticed that the laying nest occupancy is a focus point.
BY BOUKE POELSMA M Profile
Name: Melvin Hazeleger (22) Residence: Kootwijkerbroek (the Netherlands) Enterprise: 3rd year HAS student Melvin Hazeleger manages broiler parent stock farm Puurveen Kip B.V. The farm has three poultry houses with 28,500 JA57 darf hens in total, excluding males. The parent hens’ offspring are slow-growing broilers. Hazeleger works with one employee, Martin Bloemendal.
elvin Hazeleger points at the brown JA57 par- ent hens and the white M22 males in the poul- try house. “Isn’t it a beautiful sight?” The young farm manager runs broiler parent stock com-
pany Puurveen Kip BV in the Dutch village of Kootwijker- broek and is passionate about his job. The adult males make quite some noise. Photographer Henk Riswick does not need to wait long before he sees them mating with several hens. “That happens all the time in the afternoon,” Hazeleger points out. He has managed this location for over two years
now. He also worked with dwarf parent stock in the two years before that.
Young and ambitious Hazeleger grew up on a farm. He was born and raised in the Gelderse Vallei, a poultry-dense region in the centre of the Netherlands. There he developed an affinity for the poultry sec- tor at a young age. In his teens he took a job at Morren Breed- ers. At the moment he combines his studies at Dronten agricul- tural university with managing the poultry farm. This works out fine for him in terms of managing his time, given that the farm’s only other employee, Martin Bloemendal, takes a lot of the work off his hands. “However, it will be more difficult during graduation,” says Hazeleger. The young poultry farmer is brim- ming with ambition. He would like to run his own breeding farm someday. However, that is not on the agenda yet. He first needs to get more experience of this craft, he reasons. “For breeders, stockmanship is a pre-requisite. Managing a breeding flock is a craft you learn by experience. Male manage- ment especially requires a lot of attention to detail. Males need to grow but they cannot get too heavy and need to remain vi- tal. I did not grow up in the trade but I am eager to learn. I ask fellow breeder managers and consultants to share their experi- ence and try to gain more insight. In the end, I do make my own decisions. What works on one farm may not always be applicable to your own”.
Many floor eggs The darf parent hens in the poultry house are 35 weeks old. The birds arrive at the age of 19 weeks and leave when they are 65 weeks old. Hazeleger is currently managing his second flock as farm manager at this location. He was satisfied with the last flock, when he began with 30,500 parent hens in three poultry houses. The number of breeding eggs per housed hen was 217, which led to 192.4 chicks. The hatching rate was 88.66% while the loss was 4.5%. “The first flock did better than expected,” says Hazeleger. But he sees room for improvement. In the farm’s largest poultry house which houses 18,500 hens, the number of floor eggs requires more labour. “The number of floor eggs during the last flock was 8%,” Hazeleger reports. Together with Bloemendal he spends quite a few hours pick- ing up the eggs. “We work hard to remove the floor eggs as quickly as possible”. The occupancy of the laying nests in his
14 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 5, 2020
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