(VEN) – With a project to study, select, breed and develop some colorful feeder egg and meat chicken lines with high quality and productivity, scientists from the National Institute of Animal Husbandry’s Thuy Phuong Poultry Research Center have helped increase earnings by more than VND1 trillion, provided jobs for 146,000 people and contributed to sustainable development of poultry farming in Vietnam.
Selecting and breeding
Thuy Phuong Poultry Research Center Director and project director Phung Duc Tien said that on January 16, 2008, the Prime Minister approved an animal husbandry development strategy to 2020 that set an annual growth target of 5-7 percent. This requires the sector to adopt high-productivity breeds. While industrial chicken lines were difficult to develop and domestic chicken lines had a low productivity, many countries worldwide chose developing colorful feeder egg and meat chicken lines because these chicken lines had a high efficiency and a price double that of industrial chickens. Vietnam used to import a number of commercial and parent chickens from China to farm and the results were relatively good. This showed that if Vietnam wanted to expand this farming model it would have to spend a lot of money to import parent chickens. Importing grandmother and grandfather chickens is costly because each of these chickens was priced almost VND1 million. Importing breeds this way could bring diseases and viruses to Vietnam.
To solve the problem, the Thuy Phuong Poultry Research Center studied how to create colorful feeder egg and meat chicken lines. It takes 10-15 years to create a new line from an elite line of cocks. Center scientists went about this process in a different way. They used domestic materials, selected elite populations, and evaluated and experimented with these populations for three years. After some optimistic results, scientists selected and created new lines from those elite populations. They evaluated each individual of those elite populations to select highly productive and good phenotypes and left the birds to breed. This method has never been applied in any country or territory in the world, Tien claimed.
Through genetic analysis, the scientists defined the genetic parameters to select and create new colorful feeder egg and meat chicken lines that are suitable to Vietnamese conditions, including chicken breeds referred to TP1, TP2, TP3 and TP4 and two colorful feeder egg chicken lines coded HA1 and HA2.
Tien said that these chicken breeds were equally as good as foreign poultry, with the male TP4 chicken capable of rapid growth and can weigh 3-3.2 kilograms when they are 24 weeks old (similar to weight of France’s Sassco chicken line); 68-week old female TP1, TP2 and TP3 chicken lines produce 178-184 eggs each, higher than Chinese birds that can make just 8-10 eggs each; 74-week HA1 and HA2 chicken lines can produce 236-239 eggs each; the price of a chicken for cooking stands at VND40,000, while that of a domestically raised bird is VND15,000, that of an imported parent colorful feeder egg chicken is VND80,000 and that of a domestically created colorful feeder egg chicken is VND14,000.
The center has so far transferred about 600,000 parent chickens to serve the production of almost 70 million commercial chickens, and about 300,000 parent feeder egg chicken to almost all provinces nationwide. The CP Thailand and JAFA (Indonesia) companies have signed annual contracts to buy a large amount of parent chickens from the center.
Tien said that the 70 million commercial colorful chickens, with a farming time 14 days shorter than conventional colorful chickens, provided the market with 160,000 tonnes of high quality poultry meat; each of these chickens is 200-300 grams heavier than a conventional chicken so the 70 million chickens provided an additional 17,000 tonnes of meat worth VND670 billion; the cost to feed the new chickens was VND250 billion less than that required to feed conventional chickens; the new chickens have a price lower than that of imported products of the same kind and this brought benefit worth 35 billion; HA1 and HA2 chickens, with high productivity, brought profits worth about 33 billion. This showed that the project yielded profits worth more than VND1 trillion.
The center received First Prize of the 2012 VIFOTEC Award and the WIPO Award of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for the project./.
By Quynh Nga
Đăng ký: VietNam News
