The standard we run to.
Rivers State livestock, run to a standard. This is the standard that sentence refers to — the benchmarks we hold the layer flock against, and what we do when it misses them.
Most farms hold their benchmarks in somebody’s head. We publish ours, because a standard nobody can check is not a standard — it is a claim.
The performance figures below are ISA Brown’s own, from the breed’s management guide. We have not reproduced the full week-by-week tables here — Hendrix Genetics publishes those, and the link is at the foot of this page. What follows is the part that is ours: the rules that decide when a bird changes feed, what we check first when production drops, and the point in the cycle where a decision has to be prepared rather than taken in a hurry.
It is written for our own farm manager. If it is useful to another layer farm in Rivers State, so much the better.
Five feed phases, and the rule that governs all of them.
A bird moves to the next ration when she has made the weight for the current one. Not when the calendar says so.
- Super ChickWeeks 1–3
High-protein starter. The frame the whole cycle is built on.
Phase 1 of 5 - ChickWeeks 4–9
Transition. Skeletal growth and organ capacity are set here.
Phase 2 of 5 - Grower PelletWeeks 10–16
Frame and gut capacity. Underweight now is underweight at peak.
Phase 3 of 5 - (Pre) LayWeeks 17–18
Calcium reserves laid down before the first egg.
Phase 4 of 5 - Layer PelletWeek 18 onward
Full laying ration. Switched on the 5% rule below, not on a date.
Phase 5 of 5
The rule: do not advance a phase until the body-weight target for the current one has been met. An underweight pullet at point of lay underperforms for the whole cycle, and no amount of good feeding later buys the frame back. We weigh a sample of 15 to 20 birds every week from week 15, and a bird that has not reached 1,475 to 1,500 grams by week 18 stays on grower regardless of her age.
We feed pellets, not mash — and the reason is not only wastage.
We switched because mash was being wasted. The more interesting effect turned out to be what it does to the ration itself.
A mash is a mixture of particles of different sizes, and a hen can sort it. She picks out the coarse, palatable fragments — the cracked maize — and leaves the fine ones behind. The fines are where the premix and the limestone are. So a flock on mash can be eating a visibly full trough and still be short of the calcium printed on the bag, because the calcium is the part sitting at the bottom of the trough.
A pellet cannot be sorted. Every mouthful carries the formulation in the proportions it was mixed in, which means the ration the bird eats is the ration that was formulated. That is the whole argument: selective feeding is invisible, it looks exactly like a bird eating normally, and it shows up weeks later as a shell problem nobody can trace back to the trough.
The wastage is the obvious part — less spilled, less blown about, less swept up. Intake is steadier too, which matters most in heat, when a bird eats in short bursts and needs every bout to count.
The 5% rule: switch on the birds, not on the date.
The full layer ration begins when about five per cent of the flock is laying — for a flock of a thousand, roughly fifty eggs a day.
The reason is calcium. A laying ration carries 3.5 to 4.2 per cent calcium; a pullet developer carries about one per cent. Start the laying ration too early and you are feeding shell-building calcium to a bird with no shell to build, which loads her kidneys for nothing. Start it too late and she builds the first shells out of her own skeleton.
Neither failure announces itself. Both show up weeks later as thin shells, and by then the cause is a month behind you. That is why the trigger is a count of eggs rather than a date in a diary.
Read the bag, not the guide.
Every intake figure in any management guide assumes a feed energy. Ours assumes 2,900 kcal/kg. Your feed may not.
- Feed below 2,900 kcal/kg ME — birds will eat MORE than the guide figure, because they eat to an energy requirement.
- Feed above 2,900 kcal/kg ME — birds will eat LESS. Neither is a management problem.
- If intake runs 10–15% over the guide consistently, check the energy on the bag before you go looking for a fault in the house.
And the name on the bag is not evidence. Calcium is what tells you which life stage a feed is for, because it is the one figure that cannot be marketed around. Anything under three per cent is not a laying ration, whatever the sack is called. We read the printed analysis on every new feed and convert it to grams per bird per day before it reaches a bird — a percentage compared against another percentage tells you nothing.
When hen-day falls below 90% in weeks 22 to 40, check in this order.
The order is deliberate: cheapest and most reversible first, and the vet fifth rather than first.
- 01
Lighting
Confirm 16 hours of light a day. The commonest cause, and the cheapest to fix.
- 02
Feed
Confirm the correct ration and the actual grams eaten per bird — not the grams issued.
- 03
Water
Confirm clean, uninterrupted supply and check nipple flow rate. A bird that cannot drink will not eat.
- 04
Stress
Heat, crowding, noise, a predator getting in at night. Shell forms overnight; a disturbed night shows up as a defect.
- 05
Health
If nothing environmental explains it within 48 hours, call the vet. Do not wait for the next visit.
Any week below 90% hen-day between weeks 22 and 40 is worth investigating. The flock should be at 95 to 96 per cent across weeks 25 to 30 — that window is the benchmark, and a shortfall in it compounds for the rest of the cycle.
Feed conversion has a shape, and knowing it separates a problem from a phase.
FCR is kilograms of feed per kilogram of egg mass. Lower is better — but the target moves across the cycle.
Around week 20, as the flock comes into lay, the daily figure is high — often above five — because the bird is still eating to grow as well as to lay. That is normal and it is not a fault. By week 25 it should be approaching 2.0. Weeks 28 to 31 are the best of the cycle. From roughly week 55 efficiency begins to slip, and the slope steepens from there.
We keep a cumulative figure alongside the daily one, because the daily number is noisy and the cumulative number is the truth. The method, and why most layer farms never calculate it at all, is in our note on feed conversion.
Week 65 is when the end-of-cycle decision gets prepared.
Not week 75, when it has to be taken.
Feed conversion degrades noticeably from about week 65. The economic decision — force moult, or depopulate and restock — usually lands somewhere in weeks 72 to 80, and where exactly depends on three prices that are nobody’s to control: the egg price, the feed price, and what replacement pullets cost and when they can be had.
Which is the argument for preparing the analysis at week 65 rather than reacting at week 78. A flock kept two months too long eats the margin the good weeks earned, and a flock cleared two months early throws away eggs that were still profitable. The only way to tell which is which is to have the numbers ready before the decision is urgent.
What good looks like.
The anchor figures we measure against. Breed standards, published by ISA — not our own results.
- Peak hen-day
- 95–96%
- Weeks 25–30 in a cage system under good management
- Feed conversion at peak
- 1.9–2.2
- Kilograms of feed per kilogram of egg mass
- Body weight at point of lay
- 1,475–1,500 g
- Week 18. Below it, hold the bird on grower
- Energy basis
- 2,900 kcal/kg
- Every intake figure assumes this ME. Check your bag
- Calcium in a laying ration
- 3.5–4.2%
- A developer carries about 1%. The gap is the shell
- Full production cycle
- 90 weeks
- With the economic decision point well before the end
Where these figures come from
Performance standards — hen-day, egg size, intake, body weight and feed conversion — are from the ISA Brown Management Guide published by Hendrix Genetics, and belong to them. We have summarised the anchor figures we work to rather than reproducing the full tables; the guide is free and is the better source if you want every week.
The phase rules, the trigger order, the energy-adjustment rule and the decision window are ours, from running the flock. They are a working reference, not veterinary advice — anything that looks like disease belongs with a vet who can put hands on the bird, and quickly.
More on how this plays out in practice in the journal, or see how the farm is set up.