Charoen Pokphand Indonesia Tbk ( CPIN ) continues to improve the development of a close house chicken cage development system to improve efficiency in poultry products. At present, around 30% of the farms managed by CPIN and their partners have used the closed house breeding system.
Charoen Pokphand President Director Thomas Effendy said that the development of closed house system farms is currently urgent. This is to improve the efficiency of the livestock industry. If it is efficient then automatically the price of chicken in the market is more competitive with imported products.
For this reason, Charoen Pokphand has donated 10 close houses to 10 universities in Indonesia so far. Of that number, seven close houses have been built in seven universities, including Gadjah Mada University, Diponegoro University, Sudirman University, Hasanuddin University, Lampung University and Andalas University and Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB).
While there are three universities that have also signed an MoU for the construction of closed house farms, namely Udayana University, Brawijaya University and Sebelas Maret University (UNS).
For each cage that is built it can accommodate 20,000 chickens, except that UGM only holds 6,000 chickens and Lampung University holds 3,000 chickens. “We build the close house farm in accordance with the size of the land prepared, and we require the land to be on campus, so that the last two, the land is small so that the smaller one is built,” said Thomas, Wednesday (10/16).
Thomas explained, for each cage, they poured an investment of Rp 2 billion. The budget is derived from the company’s CSR funds to help increase the birth of livestock experts who understand how to farm with the close house system. Because according to him, it is not easy to farm a house system because all the tools are modern and clearly systemized.
According to him, the advantage of close house farming is that the production level is more certain, which is around 30 days with an average body weight of 1.7 kilograms (kg) to 1.8 kg. While in open farms, the average new can be harvested 35 days with a lower weight. Then the chicken mortality rate is lower at 3% and below. While in open farm systems the mortality rate reaches 5% and above.
While the problem at this time is, there are still limited workers ready to work on the farm with a closed house system. Even though this animal husbandry system is capital intensive.