Poultry Editing and Proofreading Services

The biosecurity sign at the farm entrance lists eleven requirements in small type. The people who most need to read it are a relief stockperson at half past five, a gas engineer who has never been on a poultry unit, and a catching crew who were on another site four hours ago. All three walk past it, and the sign has done nothing at all.

We edit what poultry businesses produce — biosecurity protocols and site entry instructions, flock records and production documentation, health plans and veterinary protocols, catching and depopulation procedures, contract grower agreements and payment settlements, welfare and assurance scheme documentation, notifiable disease response plans, and processor and supplier correspondence. Our editors work on instructions that have to work on people who are not poultry people.

The biosecurity instruction is the document standing between a site and a disease that ends it, and its failure is a list of rules written for somebody who already understands why. Compliance here depends on visitors who are in a hurry and have no stake in the outcome. We work through these so the instruction is written as a sequence of physical actions in the order they happen at the door, since a list of principles gets skimmed and a numbered sequence gets followed; so each step says what to do rather than what to avoid, because "do not enter with outdoor footwear" requires a decision and "take your boots off here, put these on" does not; so the highest-risk visitor is the one the document is written for — the contractor who has been on another unit that morning — with the previous-site question asked directly and a stated exclusion period; so the physical layout does the work the words cannot, with the barrier, the bench and the bin described as they are on this site; so the person responsible for challenging a visitor is named by role and given the sentence to say, given that the failure is social and not informational; so the delivery and collection procedures cover vehicles and drivers who never enter a building; and so the response on a suspicion of notifiable disease is a short, separate document with the telephone number on it. Instructions written this way get followed by people who do not care.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including protocols, flock records, contracts and veterinary material. We are editors rather than veterinarians, poultry specialists or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on biosecurity, disease control or compliance. What we can do is make the instruction work on the person least likely to follow it.