Learning Never Stops: Gumboro Vaccination with a Twist at the Brooding Pen

On today's enterprise, I was allocated to go to the brooding pen, which happens to be at the extreme end of my institution. It started yesterday, and I started with the afternoon shift because we have a lot of people to monitor and take care of the birds, both the young and the grown ones. But today I happen to be on the morning shift, which starts at 7 am and runs until 1 p.m. Thereafter, the other shift, which is the afternoon shift, will come in and take over to run from 1 p.m. until 6 pm, and then the night shift thereabout.

Actually, I have no problem with this because I was once a consultant on a farm and I once worked with a veterinary doctor. So I have become used to the system and how it works. This morning, we had to give them some vaccinations, and the vaccine we administered to them was the gumboro vaccine for 250 chicks. The total amount of birds available is 254, but we recorded a mortality rate of about 7 chick's in the space of one week, and now we have a total of 247 birds still active and running.

In the cause of doing morning shift today, like I said earlier, we vaccinated each birds by adding the gumboro vaccine to their drinking water. One thing surprised me about what the doctor did today. Actually, that's why I always say that we learn every day, no matter what we do. What I learned back then was that, the vaccine can be administered directly into their drinking water, but what I saw, or learned today was a bit different from what I knew before.

When the doctors came in this morning, I saw a sachet of milk with him, but I was thinking he wanted to use it for something else, and I had to ignore it. But in the process of using the vaccine, he added the milk to their drinking water first, and I was surprised, so I was forced to ask why he did that. The answer he gave was very good, and what he said was that the milk he added will react with either the chlorine or fluorine that is inside the vaccine and will make it work perfectly, and the birds will be able to drink from it.

Also, he did something that I might not really remember. He told us to withdrawal water from the birds for some time, and then we should feed them without water. I wondered within my mind if he was not planning a coup for the birds, but he was not. And later, he told us why he did that by saying that by the time he served the birds the vaccine, they would be able to drink from it very fast, and this wouldn't make the vaccine a waste, and we would be able to achieve our aim of vaccination.

This is actually something I have learned over a long period of time, and I didn't have much idea about it again. Now it is back to me again on a platter of gold, and I have to make use of this opportunity to learn everything. Agriculture is something I really love, and more so, taking care of animals is always what I love to do, so I do not see this as a stress only when it gets out of hand. Investing in agriculture is never a problem when you have the right information from the right person.