Faccenda scholarship helps Samatha develop passion for poultry

Posted 11 July 2017

Samantha Green, second year BSc (Hons) Animal Health and Welfare student has a real passion for poultry, seeing her investing incubators and hatching pedigree chickens.

Her passion has been recognised with a scholarship and placement job with Faccenda Foods Ltd, with support of the British Poultry Council.

The 23 year-old student from Southwell, Nottinghamshire, said: “I’ve always had a great love for poultry. I’ve had a small flock of hens from a young age as well as helping with the release of partridges, ducks and pheasants for our local shoot.

“In the last five years, I’ve invested in incubators and hatched out pedigree chickens to rear and sell.

“I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and learnt many lessons doing this from; how specific conditions must be in the hatching stage and the first few weeks of life; to what diseases and problems they can encounter.

“I’ve nursed them back to health from coccidiosis and gape worm infections, or injuries such as nursing a one winged chicken to full health and taping a pekin chick’s legs together after hatching with splay legs.

“I’ve even been known to dissect some of them after they’ve died to see if I could identify the cause.

“One thing I’ve really learnt with the chickens is how biosecurity is so important to welfare and production. This made me adopt an all-in all-out system for young chicks and only allowed the grouped pens when they were mature.

“The scholarship has given me faith in my own ability, allowing me a great opportunity to work in the poultry industry with such a fantastic company.

“I’d like to say thank you to Faccenda for giving me this opportunity, I'm so excited to be working for the company next year.

“I chose to study BSc (Hons) Animal Health and Welfare at Harper as the university has a good reputation within the agriculture sector.

“I wanted a course that gave me optimum employability options to enable me to work up within a company structure. My courses allows me to work with both small and large animals as I felt this gave a broad view across the entire animal sector rather than limiting myself to just farm animals.