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Japfa builds teaching farm for Gadjah Mada students
Chickens raised in closed-coop farms can weigh 200 grams more than those that are raised in open ones.
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A farm worker collects eggs from a chicken coop at the Renaa Farm. (JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)
P
oultry firm PT Japfa Comfeed Indonesia is developing a closed-coop chicken farm in Yogyakarta in cooperation with Gadjah Mada University (UGM) to get the maximum results out of raising broiler chickens.
The company built the closed-coop chicken farm inside the university's school of animal husbandry complex that would be used as a teaching farm for the students to gain knowledge of raising chickens on the farm.
The company's head of technology and nutrition, Ferry Poernama, said recently that the innovation enabled farmers to increase the weight of their chickens significantly without having to give them additional feed.
"Chickens raised in closed-coop farms can weigh 200 grams more than those that are raised in an opened-coop one," he explained on the sidelines of the teaching farm inauguration in Yogyakarta.
He explained that broiler chickens raised in an opened-coop farm typically weighs about 2.3 kilograms after 35 days, while those in a closed coop would weigh about 2.5 kg within the same period.
The additional weight gain was due to the fact that they were raised in a tightly controlled environment, in which farmers could control air circulation, temperature and wind speed digitally, he said.
Ferry said that the controlled environment would present ideal conditions for the chickens because the house could eliminate the risk of stress that chickens endure when raised in open-coop farms because of high humidity or temperatures that were omnipresent in tropical countries, resulting in increased livestock productivity.
