Why "no deaths today" is a record worth keeping
A blank is not a zero. How to record a clean day so your mortality figures stay honest, and why the days nothing happened matter as much as the bad ones.
On this page
A blank page can mean two things
Open a farm notebook and find a day with nothing written in the mortality column. What happened that day? Either no birds died, or nobody checked, or somebody checked and forgot to write it down. The page looks the same in all three cases.
That matters more than it seems. If you can't tell a clean day from a missed day, you can't trust your mortality figures, and those figures are how you spot disease early, judge a batch of chicks, and work out how many birds you really have.
Write the zero
The fix is simple: on a day with no deaths, record that there were none. A written zero says someone looked. A blank says nothing.
Make it part of the same walk-through where deaths are counted:
- Walk every house, every day, at the same time.
- Remove and count any dead birds.
- Write down the count, including zero, with the date, the house and your name.
Record deaths and culls separately
Birds you remove on purpose, because they are sick, injured or not laying, are culls, not deaths. Keep them in a separate column. Both lower your bird count, but they tell different stories: a rise in deaths points to a health problem, while a rise in culls may just mean someone sorted the flock.
Turn the counts into a rate
Mortality rate
Deaths in the period ÷ birds at the start of the period × 100
Example: 18 deaths in a week from 2,430 hens = 0.74% for the week.
Track it two ways:
- Weekly, to catch a sudden rise early.
- Cumulative, from placement to today, to judge the flock over its life against your breed guide.
Both only work if every day has a record. Five missing days can hide a bad week, or make a good week look suspicious.
What a missing record should trigger
If a day has no mortality entry at all, treat it as unchecked, not as clean. Ask whoever was on duty, check the house, and fill it in. A short daily review, when the manager looks for gaps before the end of the day, catches most of these while people still remember.
In OrnisNest, a worker can mark a flock as checked with "No deaths or culls". The day then shows as checked, with who checked it, while a flock with nothing recorded stays marked as not recorded.