When houses for breeders in production are designed or reconstructed, the ideal dimensions are often a topic for discussion. To be able to understand the limitations and options of house length, house width but also density per m2, its important to know which thresholds have to be taken into account.
An factor that determines for a large portion the dimensions of a breeder house is actually the laying nest. This holds for both the length of the house as the width of the house.
Length of the house:
When we use automatic (mechanical) community nests, which are at this moment probably the most widely used type of laying nests, we normally do not want to make them longer than 100 meter. This is because the egg belt that is used is often in the long term not strong enough to withstand the tearing force that occurs when the egg belt is used over a distance longer than 100 m. Usually we do not see the problems in the first year(s), but after a few years we do see more breakage occurring, which is a nuisance as it is not easy to repair.
Width of the house:
Also the width of the house is determined by the laying nests. We usually do not want to go over 100 birds per m1 of double sided laying nests, 50 birds per m1 on one side. This means that a meter length of house can host approximately 100 birds, as 1 meter of house is capable of accommodating 1 meter of nests if one row of nests is used. This means that the width of the house is determined by the density of the birds per m2. We usually have approximately 6.5 females per m2. This means that we need in 1 m1 of house (1 m1 of nest) we can have 100 birds/ 6.5 birds per m2 is approximately 15 meter wide houses. If we want to increase the density per m2 to for instance 8.5 birds per m2 we can make our houses 100/8.5 = 12 m wide.
If we make our houses 12 m wide and we use a density of 6.5 females per m2, we have 78 birds per m1 of house and per m1 of nests, and we are not utilizing our nests fully.
Of course, house density is not only about the nests, as we also have to put in the feeders and drinkers for that many birds per m2. The limitations for the equipment are discussed in the next article, “Equipment dimensions for breeder houses in production”.