Abstract:

Poultry provides rural families with a low cost, highly efficient and nutritious protein. Providing access to improved chicken breeds suitable for African conditions is one of the key elements to increase the rural poultry productivity at small scale farmer level. A breeding program (BP) including performance testing under African conditions is essential to be able to improve these chicken breeds. We show that we can increase the body weight of a pureline breed housed in France by including crossbred offspring performance from Burkina Faso into the BP of SASSO. The selection differential increased from +15 to +52 considering including and selecting for the performance measured in Burkina Faso. Running an effective BP for developing the best performing breeds under African conditions does not only require collecting performance information locally but also keeping the pureline in a bio-secure environment. Through such a program it is possible to serve customers world-wide consistently.