On-farm hatching leads to significantly lower antimicrobial use

In a case study using data from 2,471 broiler flocks, on-farm hatched flocks had significantly more antimicrobial-free flocks (48%) compared to traditional flocks (12%). In addition, on-farm hatched flocks had a significantly lower treatment incidence (TI) (44%) at flock level (TI 8.40 vs TI 15.13). Farms using traditional hatching had a 5.6 times greater probability of using antimicrobials than those using on-farm hatching. On-farm hatching is more and more widely used in Europe to tackle we