• Livestock

Fence around the farm

The BroilerNet project involves a bottom-up approach to identify challenges and innovation needs for broiler farmers in Europe, and to collect promising and already successfully implemented Good Practices to meet the challenges in questions. The top Good Practices selected by experts within the three thematic areas (animal health management, animal welfare and sustainability) have been summarized in factsheets. Farm biosecurity includes many different practices and infrastructure. Biosecurity hazards can be either animals that can introduce biological contamination (bacteria, viruses, etc.) or predators that can cause injuries or mortality to the flock. An important good practice is to have a fence up to 2 m height around the farm. This barrier is normally supported on a concrete base, to further prevent animals from entering the farm. The exact type of fence is adopted to each different environment, i e type of terrain (mountain, etc) and expected risks (large or small animals in the area, etc.). It is risk based adapted to the challenges posed from the environment of each farm. In free range systems the fence serves dual purpose keeping birds inside and pests outside. Ideally the fencing mesh has small openings (<2 cm) to keep out even small animals.