Though common place in Europe and the Americas, it’s gradually springing up in the African continent and there are many already operational in South Africa. Recently with the completion and commencement of farm operations in her Automated Biosecure Poultry farm located in the Oluyole Industrial Estate, Ibadan in January 2004, Zartech Limited, Nigeria became the first to operate such automated biosecure farm complex in the West African sub-region.

The farm complex named VINA farm project was formally commissioned on 27th November 2004 by His Excellency, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The General Manager of Zartech, Mr Roger Aboujaoude first conceived idea of a closed poultry system and stringent disease infection prevention and spread control among poultry flocks sometimes in the year 2000 in a trial manner in one of the company’s rural poultry farms located in Bode-Igbo within Ibadan in Oyo state of Nigeria. Since then there’s has been serious efforts aimed at establishing a standard biosecure poultry farm and making it the de facto standard for all future farming projects to be executed in Zartech.

The first stocks were housed beginning from January 2004 and though initial hitches were recorded the response to them was very prompt. The performance of the flocks had been very impressive after the initial glitches were recovered from.

Vina farm complex has twelve ultra-modern and automated biosecure farm houses capable of stocking about 260,000 birds at any point in time. Each pen house is about 100m x 12m = 1200m² and 80m x 12m = 960m2.  Birds are house at 20 per square meter meaning that each pen house could conveniently accommodate about twenty to twenty four thousand birds.

Vina farm is an automated farm which means that the feeding, drinking, cleaning and disinfection systems are fully automated and are very efficient. The use of automatic feeding and drinking system implies no waste incurred in feeding, no waste of time, no stress during feeding.

Automatic feeding is controlled by timers with internal cycle without even being touched by human hands, no spillage or waste on the floor for optimum feed conversion. Water on the other hand cannot spill on the floor, to cause bacterial infection in the house. With the new Nipple System the water is always on the move and cannot spill.  With Nipple System Mass Medication and vaccination using Dosage Water Technique is also made possible. Apart from the fact that no waste spillage occurs, water getting bacterially infected is also under controlled and in addition there is less stress during medication and vaccination of the flock.

One method of preventing infection among birds is first of all keeping them in good environmental conditions and maintaining good hygiene among them. As a result VINA farm is well equipped and designed with environmental controls for temperature, humidity and lighting.  Environmental Control implies controlling the environment inside each house by deciding when to light for feeding and when to switch off, what are the best temperature, pressure and humidity for the current age of the Chicks for optimal growth and so on. 

Temperature for instance is controlled in two ways - one by heating using a diesel heating system when the temperature is getting low and by a cooling system using fans and water pads to reduce heat when it is too hot. In addition proper house insulation for the roof, curtains, doors and walls are already in place - The roof and the curtains are made of polythene, the side walls and doors are made of metal sheets and foam Insulation in between and the floor is made of concrete.

Vina farm has been a successful project and very unique in that nearly all the entire project was executed and supervised by Zartech’s team with little input from abroad. Reduced operational cost and high efficiency has been some of the major feats achieved by the biosecure complex apart from the fact that productivity among the flock is much better than those housed in conventional pen houses.

According to the GM who initially conceived the idea, biosecure poultry is something other poultry producers in the country and entire West-African sub-region should emulate and implement in their future projects as a way of boosting livestock production and thereby make poultry products much cheaper and readily available to all.