Performance of Vanaraja and Kaveri poultry birds in tribal villages of Jharkhand (original) (raw)

To improve the socioeconomic status of the traditional farmer, backyard poultry is a handy enterprise with low-cost initial investment, but high economic return along with guarantee for improving protein deficiency among the poor. A study was conducted to find out the performance of backyard poultry viz. Vanaraja and Kaveri in tribal villages in Jharkhand. In total 117 (76 male and 41 female) tribal backyard poultry farmers were purposively selected for the present study from four villages of Ranchi district. These farmers procured improved variety of egg from institute farm for hatching in traditional method by deshi broody hen during 2015 to 2019. The data were collected for growth, feed intake, egg production, egg weight, egg consumed, egg sold, live bird sold including rearing cost and return on back yard poultry farming. The socioeconomic data reveals that 63.24 % farmers depended on crop and livestock for their livelihood and 24.79 % on a combination of crop, livestock and non-farm sources whereas, a small proportion (11.97 %) depended solely on livestock. The day old body weight of Vanaraja and Kaveri birds were 36.43±1.27 g and 30.32±0.85 g whereas, body weight at 240 days were 1974.35±43.14 g and 1885.12±47.35 g, respectively. The average age of sexual maturity, annual egg production and egg weight at 280 days age was 172.36±2.23 and 190.11±5.25 days, 156.15±15.6 and 144.33±13.14 numbers and 55.85±5.53 and 50.21±3.54 g for Vanaraja and Kaveri, respectively. The comparative benefit-cost (B:C) ratio (gross return/ gross cost) was 2.02 and 1.89 for Vanaraja and Kaveri birds, respectively. The economics of rearing Vanaraja and Kaveri poultry birds at farmer's house was found to be beneficial for income generation and can contribute to rural livelihoods. Introduction Backyard poultry production is an age old practice in rural India. Most of the backyard poultry production is confined to rearing of indigenous birds with poor producer range of live weight of 1.0-1.5 kg and laying 50-60 numbers of small size eggs (35-40 g) annually in free range farming system [2]. To improve the socioeconomic status of the traditional farmers, backyard poultry is a handy enterprise with low-cost initial investment, but high economic return along with guarantee for improving protein deficiency among the poor [3,16]. Poultry population has grown spectacularly throughout the world comprises 23 percent in developed and 76 percent in developing countries. Nowadays many researchers and development agents are making a strong consensus that the smallholder chicken production plays a major role in poverty alleviation and food security at household level. Rajkumar et al., (2020) [27] opined that rural poultry farming with improved chicken varieties is fast growing with its proven potential to improve the livelihood and nutritional security in the country. It provides off-farm employment and income generating opportunity as well as source of gifts and religious sacrifices [11, 37, 38, 39]. Scavenging chickens also help in waste disposal system by converting leftover of grains and human foods and insects into valuable protein foods-egg and meat [10]. There is evidence that investments in small-scale poultry farming generate handsome returns and contribute to poverty reduction and increased food security in regions where a large share of the population keeps some poultry birds [15, 21, 26]. In an average, landless/marginal/small-scale Indian poultry keeping household, keeps an average flock size of 8 to 12 birds. In India, it is estimated that over 50 % of landless and marginal farmers depend on poultry and small ruminant rearing. The majority of farmers in rural areas of Jharkhand rely on rain-fed agriculture. This has led to the food insecurity in the tribal areas due to the lowering of agricultural output.