Originally founded in 2007 by a visionary young entrepreneur who dreamed of making poultry meat widely available, Imkon has grown over the past eight years to incorporate four companies: Imkon Premix, the Imkon Sut Fayz feedmill, Ohangarron Nasilli Parranda parent stock farm and a hatchery, Imkon Broiler.

With the capacity for hatching 7.8 million eggs in 2008, the original parent farm and hatchery were conceived to overcome difficulties in importing hatching eggs, at a time when the country’s poultry sector was just emerging.

By 2014, following successive expansion programmes, the hatchery was, says company director Eldor Usmanov, hatching 12 million eggs each year and running at full capacity. “The hatchery and parent farms were combined to create a single company, Ohangarron Nasilli Parranda, with a programme of building for new farms,” he says. “Our feed and premix production not only covered our own needs, but also provided a source of high quality, well-balanced feed for the local market.

“However despite having updated our hatchery climate systems several times, we lacked poultry incubation specialists – and we were struggling to realise good, large hatches of high-quality chicks.”

Uzbekistan’s climate is characterised by high temperature combined with low humidity, which created significant challenges – and at the beginning of this year, the company decided to invest in a new hatchery.

“After a thorough evaluation of every hatchery supplier from China to the EU,” says Mr. Usmanov, “we agreed that only Pas Reform’s SmartPro™ incubation system could deliver the advances that we were looking for to realise our plans.”

In addition to the modular design of SmartPro™ single stage incubation, which promotes homogenous temperature distribution in each section of the setter, Pas Reform’s Adaptive Metabolic Feedback™ (AMF™) continually ‘reads’ the time-varying metabolism of each batch of embryos, actively managing moisture and CO2 in the incubator, to fine-tune the environment according to the embryo’s needs. Ultimately AMF™ maximizes uniformity by optimizing airflow, the evaporation of moisture and air redistribution.

Imkon’s new hatchery complex is due for completion in February 2017, with Pas Reform providing full site planning and project management services, as well as ongoing technical support from Pas Reform Academy specialists, to optimize performance. The installation will include SmartSetPro™ setters and SmartHatchPro™ hatchers, bringing the new hatchery’s initial capacity to 12 million hatching eggs per year.