Reading a close-out sheet honestly

The close-out sheet is where a flock tells you the truth about itself. Most are read to confirm what the farm already believes, which is the one way to learn nothing from them.

Every flock ends with a set of numbers: mortality, feed conversion, average weight, age, uniformity, condemnations. Read together and honestly, they tell you what went right and what to change. Read selectively, they just soothe.

Read FCR against weight and age, never alone

Feed conversion means nothing on its own. A 1.6 at a heavy weight and a 1.6 at a light weight are different results, and the same FCR at 35 days and at 42 days is not comparable. Always read feed conversion next to the age and the weight it was achieved at, and against your own past flocks in the same house and season, not against a number from a different farm.

Where the mortality actually fell

Total mortality is a headline that hides the story. What matters is the shape. First-week mortality points at chick quality, brooding and the hatchery. A mid-cycle spike points at disease or a management event. A late climb points at heart, leg or ascites problems tied to growth rate and environment. The same 5% means very different things depending on which week it came from, so plot it, do not just total it.

Total mortality is a headline. The week it fell in is the story, and that is the part farms skip.

Uniformity and the quiet losses

Two flocks can share a weight and a mortality and be nothing alike. A wide spread of weights means part of the house never performed, birds that ate feed and returned little, and that shows up in the margin even when the averages look fine. Poor uniformity almost always traces back to the first week and to environment, feeder and drinker access, and brooding temperature.

One change per flock

The point of an honest close-out is to pick the single most expensive problem and fix that before the next placement, then read the next sheet to see if it moved. Change everything at once and you learn nothing, because you cannot tell which change worked. Flock-to-flock discipline is what turns a stack of close-out sheets into a rising curve.

The numbers are honest even when we are not. Read them against your own history, find where the loss really sat, and let the next flock start ahead of the last.