Proposal for Temperature Settings of Poultry Houses, Aiming at Death Reduction

Abstract

Poultry farming is an important industry in Japan. To increase profits, firms seek to increase the numbers of eggs produced by reducing the number of hen deaths during breeding periods. We hypothesize that the setting temperature of the poultry house has a large influence on the number of deaths. Therefore, we conduct a regression analysis on the number of hen deaths to reveal the influence of temperature. Thus, we correlate the fluctuating ranges of summer temperatures with hen deaths. The large fluctuating range of temperature seems to reduce the number of deaths in summer.We speculate that a rise of the temperature in a poultry house with a rise of outside temperature leads to an increase of the fluctuating range of the setting temperature and the reduction of the number of deaths.