At the 2025 Poultry Science Association annual meeting, Carria Xie, PhD student, University of Sydney, posed a question to the audience: “The biggest goal in the broiler industry is to increase performance, but how exactly do we go about doing that?”
One possibility is on-farm hatching to reduce biosecurity and sanitation risks associated with transporting newly hatched chicks, Xie noted. On-farm-hatched chicks also have immediate access to food and water.
Xie and a team of university researchers developed a trial to compare growth performance and feed efficiency of chicks hatched on the farm and in conventional hatcheries. Read more