Poultry breeding in India goes high-tech

India's revenue minister, K.P. Rajendran, has inaugurated the hi-tech layer breeding farm and hatchery set up by the Kerala State Poultry Development Corporation (KSPDC) at Kuzhoor.

The minister said that the Corporation had been successful in increasing poultry egg and chicken meat production in the state significantly in the past three years by offering laying hens to households under various schemes.

He said that those programmes had not only helped the BPL families to add to their income but had also worked as an important instrument for the empowerment of women.

Presiding over the function, A.K. Chandran MLA said that the land for the farm had been acquired by the then Chief Minister K. Karunakaran with a view to establishing a poultry farm and poultry feed production unit.

He said that for setting up the feed unit, a concrete structure had been constructed. However, the project was later abandoned. The next important project of the farm authorities is to complete the unfinished structure and set up a feed unit for which a 700-million-rupee (INR) project proposal has been submitted to the Central Government and its approval is awaited. In his report, the Managing Director of KSPDC, Dr V. Sunil Kumar, said that the farm had 3,500 (3,000 female and 500 male) parent stock to produce 750,000 hatching eggs every year. He said that from these hatching eggs, 300,000 laying hens could be produced to generate 60 million eggs costing INR200 million annually.