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A full-scale breeding program was commenced in 1958, with commercial shipments in Canada and the US in 1959 and in Europe in 1963. [7] As a second example, color sexing broilers was proposed by Shaver in 1973. The genetics were based on the company's breeding plan for egg layers, which had been developed in the mid-1960s.
Broiler breeder farms raise parent stock which produce fertilized eggs. A broiler hatching egg is never sold at stores and is not meant for human consumption. [9] The males and females are separate genetic lines or breeds, so that each line can be selected for optimal traits for productivity in either females or males, rather than a single line in which a compromise is reached between female ...
Poultry farming is the form of animal husbandry which raises domesticated birds such as chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese to produce meat or eggs for food. Poultry – mostly chickens – are farmed in great numbers. More than 60 billion chickens are killed for consumption annually.
The mode of reproduction of a crop determines its genetic composition, which, in turn, is the deciding factor to develop suitable breeding and selection methods. Knowledge of mode of reproduction is also essential for its artificial manipulation to breed improved types.
Selective breeding has been responsible for large increases in productivity. For example, in 2007, a typical broiler chicken at eight weeks old was 4.8 times as heavy as a bird of similar age in 1957, [36] while in the thirty years to 2007, the average milk yield of a dairy cow in the United States nearly doubled. [36]
Vent sexing in Wenchang, Hainan, China (2014). Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male.
Especially in poultry, the act of sitting on eggs to incubate them is called brooding. [1] The action or behavioral tendency to sit on a clutch of eggs is also called broodiness , and most egg -laying breeds of poultry have had this behavior selectively bred out of them to increase production.
Selection for fast early growth-rate, and feeding and management procedures to support such growth, have led to various welfare problems in modern broiler strains. [1] Welfare of broilers is of particular concern given the large number of individuals that are produced; for example, the U.S. in 2011 produced approximately 9 billion broiler chickens.