1.Introduction
Backyard poultry farming is an age-old farm activity of rural families
still popular in India. It also is potent source of subsidiary income
for landless and poor farmers characterized by low investment and higher
economic returns, which can easily be managed by women, children and
elder members of the households. Meat and eggs from birds reared by the
family is considered as the best and cheapest source for meeting out
protein and energy requirements of resource poor households.
Traditionally,
backyard poultry farming is a low input business characterized by
indigenous night shelter system, scavenging system, natural hatching of
chicks, poor productivity of birds, with little supplementary feeding,
local marketing and no health care practice.
In India, the organized or commercial sector of poultry is
contributing nearly 70% of the total output and the rest 30% by the
unorganized sector. According to the reports of Government of India, the
total Poultry population in India is 851.81 million (as per 20th
Livestock Census) and egg production is around 129.60 billion during
2021-22. The per capita availability during 2021-22 is around 95 eggs
per annum. The Egg production has shown positive growth as 6.19% during
2021-22. In this context, development of rural poultry production has
full scope to supplement the gap in requirement and availability without
much input and harm to the environment. Moreover, the products of rural
poultry enjoy better demand and have their own niche market, also
fetches higher price than commercial poultry.
Interestingly,
majority of the rural mass in India is well versed with livestock
rearing including poultry on traditional mode, few scientific
interventions in management practices would definitely provide
sustainable livelihood through regular income, food security and
nutrition to the rural community. There is a need to focus on rural
poultry production, which includes backyard rearing of desi/native
chickens and rearing of new chicken breeds evolved for rural poultry
production.