VISAKHAPATNAM: The Chintapalli Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS) is now experimenting to hatch country chicks or desi chicks and rare breeds, besides providing an opportunity to the naxal-affected mandal tribals of Visakha agency area in Andhra Pradesh to get income through the country chicken.
Interestingly, a country chicken egg costs around Rs 15 and a bird costs between Rs 600 to Rs 800 whereas a poultry egg costs below Rs 6 and the bird costs around Rs 200.
The RARS centre brought an egg hatching incubator from Kerala to introduce an integrated farming system in the tribal area of fish cum poultry farming. Initially, one batch of production had a 60% success. After four or five batches of production of country chicks and other breeds such as Kadaknath, Giriraja, and Vanaraja chicks, the centre would give the chicks to tribal beneficiaries to rear the birds of different breeds.
“It is in the experimental stage. We wish to show the farmers the integrated farming of fish and poultry, in which they can earn money. A shed-like arrangement would be set up on a small pond in which aqua farming would take up,“ the RARC associate director of research T Anuradha said.
The scientist associated with this program, Appa Rao said that this solar-based incubator would hatch 200 eggs at a time. There are no poultries for a country chicken like layer or broiler chicken. We can hatch country chicken and rare breeds of birds in this incubator to provide an opportunity to the tribal farmers to earn money,” he added.
This is the first of its kind in the district and the Anantapur district research centre had a small capacity of the incubator. As part of the tribal sub-plan scheme, the tribal beneficiaries would be identified and would distribute the chicks.
