A new product being offered to customers as Shur-Gain’s layer nutrition program aims to make flock management more efficient and less time-consuming.
St. Marys-area egg producer Megan Veldman, one of the early adopters, believes it will be a success.
Why it matters:Â Timely management of factors influencing egg production can have a significant impact on the ultimate income from a flock.
Approximately six years into managing one of her family’s egg production barns, Veldman began looking for a way to streamline and improve record-keeping and calculation of parameters as feed consumption, mortality, egg production, egg weight and cost per bird.
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She “found it quite surprising” that no other farmers she talked with had yet to take advantage of products available in the rapidly evolving field of information technology to tackle these tasks.
With the newly-released, website-based IntelEgg, Veldman said she now can input the necessary data and keep track of the resulting trends without even having to be in the barn.
And she’s looking forward to the conclusion of the egg-laying cycle of her first flock under IntelEgg management, when time constraints brought on by finalizing all the data should virtually disappear.
Veldman had been using an outdated Excel spreadsheet-based program for inputting and tracking production parameters but she was looking for an upgrade. After first asking around about what other producers were using, she learned about Trouw Nutrition’s efforts to develop a website-based program for its Shur-Gain feed division customers.
The company wanted to connect with egg producers who were interested in sharing their thoughts on what parameters are important and how they prefer to interface with an online tool that would track those parameters and calculate trends. She agreed to join a small group of producers testing out prototypes of the platform.
“They wanted us to let them know about things you might not think about if you’re not a farmer in the barn,” Veldman recalled.
Eventually the final product — with input from those test farmers taken into account — was released and she has been using IntelEgg in the barn she manages for several weeks.
“It has been great,” she said. “Just being able to go online and input all my stuff has been so nice. I really like how they’ve set up the program.”
An article on the Trouw Nutrition website states the newly-released platform enables egg producers to “generate flock reports in real time, covering both bird performance and economic measures. These reports can track daily and weekly performance via measures such as egg production and egg weight, and compare these results to established standards for that specific breed and housing type.”
Currently, IntelEgg is only available in a website version but Trouw Nutrition is working on a smartphone app version that should be available within months.
Prior to IntelEgg’s introduction, Veldman typically did calculations every week tracking egg numbers and egg weights but now she simply inputs the numbers daily and the calculation is performed automatically.
She also has easy access to information about feed consumption, feed costs and egg revenue.
She says she was always aware of what her target numbers should be with each flock but, with the IntelEgg platform, “you can see those calculations right away if you want to. It’s a lot easier to see where you are compared to where your target is.”
She’s looking forward to getting the other laying barns under the Veldman Farms umbrella on the IntelEgg platform, as well as adding her father Dan to the small list of support personnel with access to the barn’s IntelEgg online portal.
Dan, currently Egg Farmers of Ontario vice-chair, works closely on the feed production side through his operation of the nearby Veldman Grain business.
She’s also looking forward to the conclusion of this flock’s production phase when IntelEgg will allow her to easily determine income per bird and feed costs per bird through the entire cycle.
The end of the production cycle, Veldman adds, “is probably when this is going to save me the most time because I won’t have to sit down and input all those numbers and make those calculations.”
“I’ll have been doing (the data input) as I go rather than doing it all at the end.”
