Most farms record mortality every day and weigh birds once a week. Both are worth doing. But by the time either number moves, whatever caused it has been happening for a while.
Water moves first. Industry guidance is consistent on this point: a decline in water intake is one of the earliest indicators of poor feed quality, a disease challenge, or environmental stress. It usually shifts before the birds look wrong and before the mortality line changes shape.
The ratio, not the volume
The number to watch is not litres on its own — it is water against feed.
As a working rule, broilers drink roughly 1.8 to 2 times their feed intake by weight. Different authorities quote figures at each end of that band, and both are sound: what matters is that you know your own flock's normal and notice when it departs from it.
- Ratio falling — the more serious direction. Birds off water go off feed. Check drinker line pressure and height, blocked nipples, water quality, and the birds themselves.
- Ratio rising — expected in heat. If it is not hot, look for leaking lines, spillage and drinker height. Spilled water wets litter, and wet litter is what generates the ammonia the birds then breathe.
Note the tolerance has to be generous. The ratio genuinely moves with temperature, so a threshold tight enough to fire on every warm afternoon will be ignored within a week — and an alert that gets ignored is worse than none.
Reading the meter is the whole technique
Take the reading at the same time each day and subtract yesterday's. Divide by the number of birds and you have intake per bird. That is it.
Rough expectations per 1,000 birds per day, useful as a sanity check rather than a target:
- Days 0–7: around 300 litres
- Days 8–14: around 680 litres
- Days 15–21: around 1,300 litres
- Days 22–28: around 2,100 litres
- Days 29–35: around 2,600 litres
- Days 36–42: around 2,800 litres
These vary with temperature and housing. Your own flock's trend is more informative than any table.
Water is also a dosing instrument
If you medicate or vaccinate through the drinkers, you need the intake figure for a second reason: the dose has to be consumed within a specific window to work at all. Guidance for drinking-water vaccination is exacting — withdraw water beforehand so the birds are thirsty, neutralise chlorine in the header tank, and expect the vaccine to be drunk within about half an hour.
Get the volume wrong and the vaccination quietly fails. The flock reads as vaccinated and carries no protection, and the two only disagree at the next disease challenge.
Why it is usually not recorded
Because the daily record card most farms use has no column for it. Mortality has a column. Feed has a column. Water frequently does not — and a number with nowhere to go does not get written down.
Add the column. It takes ten seconds a day, needs no equipment beyond a meter, and it is the earliest warning the flock is capable of giving you.
FuroTrack records feed and water on the same daily round, calculates the ratio against the flock's age and size, and raises a task when it moves outside the expected band.
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