Two kinds of chickens

There are two kinds of chickens in this world.

Of course that is a very ignorant statement. It is an absurdly overgeneralized analysis of an entire species of animal. Yet the statement need not be ignorant. If qualified by the idea that for the purposes of my point, let me arbitrarily, mentally, categorize chickens into two distinct groups.

Let the first of these groups be called Factory Chicken. And let the second group be called Local Chicken. Here in Belize, factory chicken is referred to as Mennonite chicken.


The primary difference in how local people distinguish between these two kinds of chickens is in the management style. That is in how the chickens are raised. If they are raised in the traditional Mestizo style of chicken production, they are local chickens. (There is also a Creole style of poultry management and a Garifuna style. )

If raised under modern conditions, scientifically developed feeding, modern poultry housing, they are called Mennonite chickens. When asked if the difference was in the Nature of the chicken or how they are raised, I was told that it is in the raising, not the Nature.

Management style then is more or less the primary difference between Local Chicken and Mennonite Chicken. However additional differences are recognized. When told that I have a hen that lays an egg nearly every day on an almost continual basis, a local woman wondered if perhaps the hen was a Mennonite Chicken. There is the recognition that the "improved" breeds of chickens used by the Mennonites are genetically capable of producing perhaps 300 eggs a year or more. The local chicken normally produces far fewer eggs. It is difficult to know the number, however, a good local chicken hen might produce something like 100 to 150 eggs a year.

There is also the recognition that the "improved" breeds of chickens used by the Mennonites for meat production are by their "nature" genetically capable of a faster rate of growth than local chickens. It seems to be understood that a local chicken given the same conditions as the Mennonite chicken will not grow as fast or as large as the Mennonite chicken.

It might be useful for me to describe what I have observed and been told about the two different practices of chicken management. In the traditional (local chicken) style of management, the chickens are permitted to scavenge throughout the day. They forage for insects and wild seeds to supplement their diet. They are fed corn, however, probably an amount that is insufficient for their requirements. They are unlikely to be fed a complete ration. Their growth rate is comparatively slow. Their egg production is comparatively low. Replacement chickens are obtained by allowing hens to incubate eggs and most often to rear the chicks until they are pullets. Chick loss is enormous. However it could be reduced with preferential feeding of the chicks using creep feeders.



In contrast Mennonite chickens, or Factory chickens, are hatched out of incubators, and brooded under a heat lamp or other controlled temperature arrangement. They are fed an optimum diet of a scientifically formulated ration and with few exceptions fed as much as they are willing to eat. Their housing is arranged in an as advanced manner as is practical, and numerous systems are or have been employed to improve the sanitation of their housing. In the most extreme and advanced method that I am aware of, the chickens are raised on wire floored cages or battery cages and their wastes are thus unable to accumulate in their immediate environment. Due the expense of such housing the population density of chickens is kept as high as possible. Medication is routinely administered to prevent disease under such high stocking rates.

Regardless of any bias I might have, it seems factual to admit that no other system is able to produce as much meat or eggs as cheaply as the management styles used to raise Factory Chickens.



Yet there is more to the situation than simple differences in management practices. A factory chicken would possibly be unable to survive if restricted to the diet of a local chicken. A local chicken fed the diet of a factory chicken can be more productive. However a local chicken even with the optimum diet would not be nearly so productive as the factory chicken. Nor even would the increase in production likely be sufficient to offset the increase in the feed cost.

It is my understanding that factory chickens have been bred to be more efficient with their food. For a given amount of food, the factory chicken will produce more eggs, or more meat than the local chicken. The only drawback of this is that such genetically improved chickens are unable to produce at even a minimal level without the availability of this high cost, highly nutritious food rations. The advantage of factory chicken is the astounding increase in productivity, either egg production or meat production.

In meat production systems, a hybrid chicken is used. These hybrids are exceptionally fast growing. In India a broiler chicken was recently developed that can grow from hatch to 2.6kg or about 6 pounds in 42 days.

Dr U. Dasgupta, Director of Marketing for Marshall Breeders: “Marshall UC is a breakthrough in the Indian poultry industry in terms of feed conversion and overall production cost. Trials conducted under average management, nutrition and environment showed that a parent bird consumed an average of 389 g per broiler chick (0-68 weeks of age), while a commercial bird reached a body weight of 2.6 kg in 42 days with a cumulative feed consumption of 4.5 kg or an FCR of 1.7.”
from worldpoultry.net news

My understanding is that this is possible due to the cross used to produce the hybrid. They are apparently Cornish chickens crossed with white rocks. The Cornish chicken is a very small bird that grows very fast. The breed probably was developed during the time of and for the purpose of chicken fighting. The white rock is apparently a large heavily muscled bird with proportionally larger breast muscles. The cross between them results in a very fast growing bird that does not stop growing at Cornish size but grows rapidly to white rock size. They reach market size in eight to twelve weeks.

I am of the understanding that they must be slaughtered by twelve weeks or they begin to die on their own. It seems that their internal organs grow to the size appropriate for Cornish game chickens, while the meat continues to grow beyond what the organs can support.

This is all applicable to the broiler factory chickens. Local chickens grow nowhere near as fast. Neither do they begin to die of organ failure. But from a purely cost analysis the hybrid factory chickens are "better" for meat production. Or at least they would be if all other things were equal.

The local chicken by contrast grows slower, produces fewer eggs, and never attains as great a size as the factory chicken. They eat cheaper food though, they require far less if any medication. Also the "start up costs" involved in getting started with local chickens are vastly cheaper than with factory chickens. In the villages, and apparently it does not matter if the village is in Belize, Nigeria, Tanzania or India, it is very possible to raise a small flock of chickens with almost no expense in feed inputs. This is because left to forage during the day, the chicken is an exceptional scavenger.

The Scavengeable Feed Resource Base
Gunaratne et al. (1993; 1994), Roberts and Senaratne (1992), Roberts et al. (1994) and Roberts (1999) have researched and classified the feed resources available for scavenging poultry in Southeast Asia, which they named the Scavengeable Feed Resource Base (SFRB). The SFRB was defined as the total amount of food products available to all scavenging animals in a given area. It depends on the number of households, the types of food crops grown and their crop cultivating and crop processing methods, as well as on the climatic conditions that determine the rate of decomposition of the food products. Seasonal fluctuations in the SFRB occur due to periods of fallow or flooding, cultivation, harvesting and processing. The SFRB includes termites, snails, worms, insects, grain from sowing, harvesting by-products, seeds, grass, fodder tree leaves, water-plants and non-traditional feed materials. The SFRB can only be harvested by scavenging animals, of which poultry are the most versatile, although this varies with species. Several types of poultry scavenging together can make more effective use of this resource.
from FAO

However as the chicken flock is increased to anything approaching a commercial level of chickens, the feed costs of the chickens increases dramatically. While a small number of chickens can more or less feed themselves off the kitchen wastes, insect population of the area, and native small seeds, as the flock size increases, it is necessary to supply a greater and greater amount of the chickens diet. While factory chickens would have starved to death long before this point is reached, local chickens begin to become far less productive. Most importantly, chick survival decreases. As competition for local salvageable chicken food increases, the chicks, the most vulnerable, and economically most important chickens, lose out. Their condition suffers, and their mortality increases.

The management of village chickens is complicated by the presence of multi-age groups in the same flock. High chick losses have been attributed to poor feeding, housing and health control practices. With no preferential treatment of the chicks, some starve to death because of high competition for the available scavenging feed resource. Where supplementary feeding and water is provided, the containers used are too deep for the chicks to reach the contents. Predation is also a major cause of high chick losses because the young stock are more vulnerable.
from FAO

But again, there is a difference between Factory Chicken and Local Chicken that goes beyond management practices. There is a very real genetic component to all of this. The Factory chickens are the result of many decades of very rigorous, scientific, selective breeding programs designed to produce a chicken that can achieve optimum performance in an environment matched to its requirements. The management practices have more or less followed along behind the advances in genetic capabilities of the modern Factory Chicken.

Local Chicken by contrast is the result of an informal, uneducated, selective breeding program designed to produce a chicken that can achieve optimum performance in an environment that is as little a burden to the farmers as possible. This has been a massively parallel genetic improvement program operating in every chicken flock over decades, perhaps hundreds of years. While the breeders are and have been by and large "uneducated", they have always lived and worked very closely with their flocks and have a far more than academic interest in selecting replacement birds.

They may also know more about chickens than the Poultry Scientist.

I know some local people very well. It is however very likely to be an error prone exercise to extrapolate my perception of their knowledge and behavior to the population as a whole. Nevertheless, I am going to do so. Further more, I will often characterize local peoples knowledge as surprising, intuitive, instinctive or informally articulated. That is a dangerous presumption. Given the opportunity to explain their knowledge in their own language, they might prove to be very knowledgeable about basic or advanced genetics, heritability, and various genotypes and phenotypes of chickens.

Their knowledge may seem informal to me because they lack the language skills to explain genetics to me in what is a second or third language for them. Let that be acknowledged before I begin to characterize the knowledge resources of people I know. Also, it should be pointed out that these people have been raising chickens very well all their lives. I have been doing so for several months.

I mentioned that the local people may know more than the poultry scientists. I say this because I was recently speaking with a local woman about chickens. I know her very well and she was explaining to me the various mutations of chickens that she is aware of. She did not say it that way, but that is what she was doing.

When our hen went broody, we purchased some eggs to add some diversity to our flock. From one of these eggs hatched this little monstrosity, a peel neck. He carries one copy of the Na or naked neck gene.

First she describe the "peel neck" chicken. She had some and pointed them out to me. I happen to know of a gene called the naked neck gene that cause the chickens not to have feathers on their necks. She explained to me that she wants more of those peel neck chickens. I asked why, explaining that her other chickens were very beautiful and the peel neck chickens looked a bit like vultures. She laughed and said she thinks they grow a bit better and she wants some.

She then proceeded to explain to me about chickens whose feathers are all curled up. I happen to know of a gene called the frizzle gene that causes a deformity in feathers. She wants some of these as well.

She mentioned about chickens that have black skin, black meat and black feet. I happen to know of a gene called fibro-melanosis. It causes melanin to be deposited all over the chickens body. It turns out there is also a gene called id that causes the chickens to have black feet.

We talked about chickens that lay blue eggs. She has some, she wants more. I happen to know of a gene that causes eggs to have a blue shell.

She mentioned that there are chickens that take a long time for their feathers to come in. I knew nothing of that. I found out though. She wants some of them.

When questioned what she wants them for, she indicated that she wants to mix them all up. As far as I can tell, this means she wants to cross them and get a chicken that has all of these traits. She has or has had in the past chickens with each of these mutations. She seems to want some birds that have all of these mutations.

Later on the internet, I discovered that she is not alone. One MAHMOUD YOUSEF MAHROUS
B.Sc. Agric. Sc. (Poultry Production), Ain Shams University, 1999 M.Sc. Agric. Sc. (Poultry Breeding), Ain Shams University, 2003
in A thesis titled EFFECT OF INTERACTION BETWEEN SOME MAJOR AND MARKER GENES ON IMMUNE RESPONSE AND PRODUCTIVE PERFORMANCE OF CHICKENS and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOFY (hey, maybe they spell it that way in Egypt) mentions all of these genes.

He is attempting to breed an ideal chicken for Egypt's hot climate. He like my friend in the village thinks that all of these genes are useful to have in such a chicken. He is a bit more able to articulate why. He quotes another researcher named Horst.

Here is the run down on those particular mutations.

The following is adapted from Table 3 of the FAO document found at http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/w8989e/W8989E02.htm
That document credits Horst, 1988 as the source of information for the table.

Na: naked neck
Incomplete dominant
Loss of neck feathers, reduction of pterlae width, reduction of secondary feathers
Improved ability for convection, reduced embryonic liveability (hatchability), improved adult fitness

F: frizzle
Incomplete dominant
Curling of feathers, reduced feathering
Decreased fitness under temperate conditions, improved ability for convection

K: slow feathering
Dominant, sex- linked, multiple allelic
Delay of feathering
Reduced protein requirement, reduced fat deposition during juvenile life, increased heat loss during early growth, reduced viability

id: non-inhibitor
Recessive, sex- linked, multiple allelic
Dermal melanin deposition in the skin and shanks
Improved ability for radiation from shanks and skin

Fm: fibro-melanosis
Dominant with multi- factorial modifiers
Melanin deposition: all over the body; sheaths of muscles and nerves, tendons, esenterium; blood vessel walls
Protection of skin against UV radiation, improved radiation from the skin, increased pack-cell volume and plasma protein

O: blue shell
Dominant, sex-linked
Deposition of blue pigment (bilverdin IX) into egg shell
Improved egg shell stability

My friend in the village mentioned chickens that have tiny little feet. I happen to know of a gene called the creeper gene. She wants some. It is semi-lethal. Maybe she is just wrong on this one. Or maybe she knows of some advantage, not known to the scientists, in chickens that are heterozygous for the creeper gene.

So when I say that a massive chicken improvement program has been carried out on the genetics of Local Chicken, I am being serious. At least some of the villagers raising chickens have very pertinent knowledge regarding chicken genetics. They may know nothing about DNA, genotype or phenotype, but they know some chickens have this or that "nature" and can pass it on to their offspring. Further, they seem to know a great deal about the effects of those mutations.

But I fear, the breeding program is faltering. I will explain why and how in a moment.

On first glance it would seem that Local Chicken is a poor substitute for Factory Chicken. Factory chicken grows so much faster that it would seem far more profitable to raise them. Even considering the high cost of feeders, housing, complete feed rations, just sheer pounds of chickens and the time required to obtain them ought to make Factory Chicken far superior from a production point of view.

This would be the case if the price paid by the consumer for Local Chicken was the same as for Factory Chicken. Mennonite or Factory chicken retails here for $1.12 lb for broilers and $1 lb for stewing hens, this is for dressed chickens, ready to cook. Local chicken sells for $1.75 lb to $2.50 lb, this is for LIVE chickens, ready to kill, pluck, clean and cook. I am not certain of the dress out percentage, but my rough guess is that local chicken is effectively selling for three times the price of factory chicken.

In a developed country, this might make sense. A premium might be paid for "free range" chickens, or chickens raised in a more natural environment. But, this premium is being paid here in Belize and other Lesser Developed Nations. The secret must be in the taste. However, I have never eaten a village chicken. During my entire life so far, the only chickens I have tasted were factory chickens. But others have eaten them, and apparently will pay highly to do so again.

By Sipho Shongwe - TIMES OF SWAZILAND-24-Jun-2009
Swaziland Livestock Technical Services wishes to advise farmers in Swaziland that there is high demand for village chickens in Swaziland.
Farmers who are producing village chickens commercially in Swaziland are happy with the profit margins they get when selling their chickens.

There is a growing number of consumers that demand organic food and village chickens produced organically are in high demand. Due to the limited supply of village chickens in the market today, the consumer is willing to pay a premium for them. The catering industry and supermarkets are failing to get suppliers of village chickens in Swaziland and they are unable to satisfy customer demand.
from swazilive.com news

Honiara Based Breeding Hatching Facility early plans have been made for a urgently needed Village Poultry Breeding and Hatching facility in the capital Honiara to meet the high demand for these chickens from across the country. No such facility currently assists as the official Govt station was destroyed during the Ethnic Conflict. The only day old chicks available are hybrid layer or broiler chicks which are not suitable for harsh village life or as tasty a meat bird to suit the high expat Chinese market.
from Sustainable_Village_Chicken_Keeping_for_Pacific_Island_Communities

The research on differences in egg quality between village eggs and commercial eggs is insufficient. This study tries to make a contribution to the question in how far there are differences in egg quality between village eggs, which are considered as a symbol of nature and freshness and commercial eggs. Especially, regarding to yolk colour and shell thickness, which play a role for consumers’ preferences, village eggs achieved good results. High values for albumen index, which is an important criteion for freshness, proved that village eggs were fresher than commercial eggs.
from medwelljournals.com

Time are getting tougher here in Belize. The villagers who are producers of local chicken have a ready market. When they produce a surplus of chickens, they sell into that market. That is why they have chickens. But then when things get hard, when they need some money, they often have little choice but to sell additional chickens. They end up selling to much of their stock, and are unable to produce as many chickens as they had intended. The result of the premium price for local chicken is a near permanent shortage of local chicken.

It is my belief that this shortage must hamper the informal program of chicken improvement that has gone on for so long. Too many chickens are being sold that the breeders would not sell except because of financial distress.

In any case, for many different reasons, when we decided to raise chickens, we decided to raise the Local Chicken and for the most part to follow the Mestizo style of traditional poultry management.