Hatchery, Poultry Breeds and Feed: The Technology Behind Indian Poultry

Poultry Breeds in India: Hybrids, Indigenous Breeds and Rural Varieties

Commercial Hybrid Broilers and Layers

The birds on India's commercial farms are specialised hybrid strains. A broiler is a chicken bred and raised for meat, and most commercial broilers reach slaughter weight between four and six weeks of age. A layer is a hen kept for eggs. Neither is a traditional village breed, and the commercial broiler chick is produced by crossing separate male and female breeding lines. Pedigree breeding of poultry began around 1916, and the first meat crossbreed, introduced in the 1930s, was a cross of a Cornish male with a White Plymouth Rock female.

Hybrid chicks reach farms through a breeding pyramid. At the top, breeding companies keep pure lines, also called great-grandparent stock. Their offspring, the grandparent stock, produce the parent stock, and the parents lay the hatching eggs from which the hatchery produces commercial day-old chicks. In India, large poultry companies called integrators often run several of these stages, from the parent farm and hatchery to the feed mill, inside one firm.

• Concentrated genetics: Around 2005, only two or three breeding companies supplied about 90 per cent of the world's broiler breeding stock.
• Strains used in India: In 2008, broiler strains such as Cobb, Ross and Hubbard, and layer strains such as Babcock, Bovans and Hisex, were being marketed in India.
• Selection for growth: Breeding for rapid early growth has made broilers efficient, but it has also brought welfare problems such as leg weakness and heart failure.

Indigenous Chicken Breeds: Aseel, Kadaknath and Registered Breeds

India's own chicken breeds are adapted to heat, disease and village conditions. The ICAR-National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources (NBAGR), Karnal, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), registers India's breeds of livestock and poultry, and each registered breed has a defined home tract.

• Aseel (also written Asil): A game chicken found particularly in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha; the word means "purebred". It is one of the parent breeds of the Indian Game, developed in the West Country of England in the early nineteenth century.
• Kadaknath: A breed from the Dhar and Jhabua districts of Madhya Pradesh, also called Kali Masi, "fowl having black flesh"; its colour comes from melanin, and it is reared mostly by rural and tribal households. Kadaknath meat received a geographical indication tag on 30 July 2018.

Indigenous birds are hardy and live by scavenging, but their productivity is low, so breeders cross them with improved lines instead of replacing them. Registration matters because a breed can be conserved, improved and supplied only once it is described and recognised. Indigenous breeds also give India the genetic material for crosses suited to its own climate and villages.

Low Input Technology Birds for Rural Poultry

Between the commercial hybrid and the indigenous breed sits a third kind of bird, made by public institutions for village backyards. These low input technology birds look like desi birds, with coloured plumage, but grow faster and lay more eggs, and they can live on free range with little bought feed. The National Livestock Mission requires the parent farms it funds to keep such birds.

• Vanaraja: A dual-purpose variety of the ICAR-Directorate of Poultry Research, Hyderabad, for free-range farming in rural and tribal areas; males weigh about 1.5 to 2.0 kg between 10 and 15 weeks and hens lay about 130 to 150 eggs in a laying year.
• Srinidhi and Gramapriya: Varieties of the same Directorate; Srinidhi hens lay about 180 to 200 eggs in a laying year in farmers' fields.
• CARI Nirbheek: A dual-purpose coloured bird of the ICAR-Central Avian Research Institute (CARI), Izatnagar, developed in an Indo-German collaborative project in 2000; it resembles the Aseel Peela, and its fighting qualities reduce losses to predators. The Institute has supplied more than 13.35 lakh units of its germplasm over 20 years, and farmers in about 16 States keep the bird.
• Other varieties: Kalinga Brown, Kaveri and Chabro from the Central Poultry Development Organisations (CPDOs); CARI Gold, Hitcari and Upcari from the Institute at Izatnagar; Giriraja and Girirani from the Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Sciences University.

Vanaraja and Srinidhi birds scavenge insects, grass seeds and waste grain, so they need only 25 to 50 g of supplementary feed per bird per day, depending on the range available; CARI Nirbheek birds are given about 35 to 40 g a day once they are settled.

Poultry Breeding Technology and Germplasm Institutions

Research Institutions Behind Poultry Germplasm

Poultry germplasm is the living genetic stock of birds, kept as pure lines, parent flocks and hatching eggs, from which new birds are bred. In India the public institutions that hold and supply it work at three levels.

• Breed records: The NBAGR at Karnal describes and registers indigenous breeds.
• Research and new varieties: The ICAR-Central Avian Research Institute at Izatnagar, Bareilly, and the ICAR-Directorate of Poultry Research at Hyderabad develop improved varieties and supply their germplasm; conserving desi chicken and developing improved crosses for rural poultry is part of the Izatnagar institute's mandate.
• Supply to farmers: The four Central Poultry Development Organisations of the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, at Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh and Mumbai, supply low input birds such as Kalinga Brown to entrepreneurs and farmers.

These bodies are eligible to supply birds to the rural hatcheries funded by the National Livestock Mission, along with State veterinary universities and private organisations holding certificates of guaranteed production. Their reach shows in the north-east. In 2016‑17, the ICAR centre in Nagaland supplied 82,647 Vanaraja and Srinidhi chicks to 1,354 farmers of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh.

Genetic Tools: Pedigree Selection, Artificial Insemination and DNA Markers

Breeding a better bird depends on knowing which birds to mate. Pedigree selection keeps records of each bird's parents and performance, so that the best families are chosen as parents of the next generation. Artificial insemination places collected semen directly in the hen's reproductive tract; it matters in broiler breeding because birds selected for heavy breast muscle find natural mating difficult.

Gene mapping places genes and DNA markers in their positions on a chromosome. Once a marker is known to lie close to a gene for a trait, breeders can pick birds by the marker instead of waiting to see the trait, a method called marker-assisted selection. It is used to select for traits such as productivity and disease resistance. Markers have been mapped in livestock such as cattle, pigs and chickens, and they are used for parentage detection and DNA fingerprinting, so a breeder can confirm an animal's pedigree from its DNA.

Gene maps help researchers understand disease-linked traits, but gene mapping does not explain every disease. Many diseases are infections, caused when pathogens such as bacteria and viruses invade the body, so a map of the host's own genes cannot by itself explain them.

Poultry Hatcheries: Types, Incubation and Chick Production

Types of Hatcheries: Poultry, Fish, Turtle and Rural Hatcheries

Hatcheries serve two kinds of purpose. Some are run for economic reasons, to increase food supplies or fishery resources, while others serve conservation by breeding rare or endangered species under controlled conditions.

• Poultry hatcheries: Produce most of the chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese consumed in the developed world. Large ones hatch great numbers at one time, so that the birds are uniform in size and can be slaughtered, or brought into laying, together; a large hatchery produces 15 million chicks a year.
• Fish hatcheries: Breed large numbers of fish in an enclosed environment, either to raise them for food or to release young fish into rivers, lakes or the sea, a practice called fish stocking.
• Turtle hatcheries: Move turtle eggs from wild nests to a protected site for conservation.
• Rural hatcheries in India: Small units, funded under the National Livestock Mission, that hatch low input technology birds for nearby villages. Each is attached to a parent farm and to a mother unit, which rears the chicks for their first four weeks.

Incubation Period of Chicken Eggs and the Hatchery Process

Fertile chicken eggs hatch at the end of an incubation period of about 21 days. A commercial hatchery runs that period as a fixed sequence.

1. Egg collection: Hatching eggs from parent flocks are cleaned, and their shells are checked for soundness.
2. Setting: The eggs go into setters, incubators that control temperature and humidity and turn the eggs regularly.
3. Transfer to the hatcher: Three days before the eggs are due to hatch, they move into a hatcher unit, where they are no longer turned, so that each embryo can take up the right position to break out of the shell.
4. Hatching: The chicks come out over a hatching window of 24 to 48 hours.
5. Sorting: Chicks are sorted and sexed where needed.
6. Dispatch and vaccination: Day-old chicks travel to farms; until they are fed there, they live on the nutrients of the yolk sac, and once they are a few days old they are often vaccinated.

Humidity must be controlled as well. If the air is too dry, the egg loses too much water, which can make hatching difficult or impossible.

Incubators, Chick Sexing and the Scale of a Hatchery

An incubator imitates a brooding hen. It keeps eggs warm within a set temperature range, at the right humidity, with a turning mechanism, and its most critical task is to hold the temperature steady through the whole incubation period. Commercial hatcheries use two methods. In single-stage incubation, every egg in the machine is of the same age, so the climate can be set for exactly what those embryos need. In multi-stage incubation, eggs of several ages share one setter, and the heat given off by the older embryos warms the younger ones, so the climate is a compromise between them.

In a hatchery, chick sexing separates female chicks from males. Layer hatcheries need it because only female chicks grow into laying hens, and broiler breeding needs it because separate male and female lines are kept. The two chief methods are vent sexing, in which a trained sexer examines the chick's vent, and feather sexing, which uses a sex-linked gene for wing-feather length in certain crosses. Vent sexing was described in a paper by two Japanese professors in 1933. Automated systems that tell the sex of the embryo inside the egg were first introduced in 2018.

The scale of a hatchery shows in the National Livestock Mission's model rural unit. It receives its hatching eggs from a parent farm of at least 1,000 parent layers, has an incubator for 15,000 eggs and a hatcher for 5,000 eggs, and sets 3,000 hatching eggs a week, from which it expects about 2,250 day-old chicks.

Poultry Feed: Ingredients, Types and Feed Mills

Nutrients in a Poultry Ration: Energy, Protein and Minerals

Poultry feed, also called chicken feed, is the food given to farm poultry. Before the twentieth century, poultry on general farms found much of their food by foraging, eating insects, spilled grain and plants. As flocks grew too large to feed that way, nutritionally complete feed was developed, and modern poultry feed consists largely of grain, protein supplements such as soybean meal, minerals and vitamins.

• Energy: Grain, mainly maize, supplies the carbohydrates.
• Protein: Oilseed meals such as soybean meal supply it, and broiler rations are kept high in protein.
• Minerals: A laying hen needs about 4 grams of calcium a day, 2 grams of which go into the egg, and oyster shell is a common source.
• Grit: Small stones help the gizzard grind whole grain, but birds on commercial feed do not need them.

The amount and make-up of the ration depend on the weight and age of the birds, their rate of growth, their rate of egg production, the weather and how much food they find by foraging. Feed must be kept clean and dry, because damp feed encourages fungal growth, and mycotoxins, poisons produced by moulds in damp feed, are among the most common and least reported causes of poisoning in poultry.

Efficiency of feed is measured by the feed conversion ratio (FCR), the kilograms of feed a bird eats for each kilogram of weight it gains or of eggs it lays. Feed is the largest cost of a commercial poultry farm, so a lower FCR means a lower feed cost for each kilogram produced.

Poultry feed is sold in three complete forms, mash, pellets and crumbles, while scratch grain is given only as a supplement.

Maize in Poultry Feed and Its Other Uses

Maize is the main grain in Indian poultry feed. About 47 per cent of India's maize is used as poultry feed, far more than any other use, and India produced 43.40 million tonnes of maize in 2024‑25.

The same grain has many other buyers, so poultry feed competes with other industries for maize.

• Starch: Maize is used to make cornstarch, which can be processed into high fructose corn syrup.
• Oil and fuel: Corn oil is extracted from the germ of the grain and is a feedstock for biodiesel, and maize grain is a feedstock for ethanol fuel.
• Beverages: Maize can be fermented and distilled into alcoholic drinks such as bourbon whiskey.

Using maize for biofuel raises the demand for it, and therefore its price, which in turn raises the cost of poultry feed.

Poultry Feed Mills and Animal Feed Plants

Integrators run their own feed mills. A feed mill grinds and mixes grain, oilseed meal, minerals and vitamins into compound feed, and for pellets it presses the mash through a pellet mill. Under contract farming, the integrator supplies day-old chicks, feed and veterinary care to the farmers who raise the birds, and pays them a growing fee per bird based on performance such as the FCR.

Government support for feed mills comes through the Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund (AHIDF), launched on 24 June 2020. It offers interest subvention on loans for dairy and meat processing units, animal feed plants, breed improvement and breed multiplication farms, and vaccine and drug units.

• Feed plants: By December 2025, 139 animal feed plants and 105 breed multiplication farms had been established or strengthened under the Fund.
• Capacity: By August 2025, the units supported under the Fund accounted for 100.22 lakh tonnes (about 10 million tonnes) a year of additional animal feed production capacity.
• Feed and fodder under the Mission: The National Livestock Mission has run a Sub-Mission on Feed and Fodder Development since 2014‑15, with a 50 per cent capital subsidy for units such as hay, silage and total mixed ration plants.

Poultry Housing, Automation and Health Technology

Environment-Controlled Poultry Houses

Commercial broilers are raised as mixed-sex flocks on litter in large, climate-controlled sheds, and the shed itself is a piece of technology. A shed protects the birds from predators and bad weather and lets the farmer control air, light, water and feed.

• Ventilation: Fans keep the air fresh and cool, and in a heat wave a power failure that shuts down the ventilation can kill 20,000 chickens in a short time.
• Temperature: The comfort zone for poultry is believed to be about 18 to 25 °C, and average daily temperatures around 33 °C interfere with feeding in both broilers and laying hens and weaken their immune response.
• Light: In egg houses, the light phase is first lengthened to start laying at 16 to 20 weeks of age and then held like a summer day, so hens lay all year round.
• Stocking density: The number of birds a shed holds is checked regularly, together with ventilation and housing, because it decides the welfare of the flock.

In many countries most laying hens are kept in battery cages, and the European Union banned conventional battery cages from January 2012.

Automated Feeding, Sensors and Precision Livestock Farming

Machinery automates feeding in industrial poultry farming, which cuts cost and lets farms grow in scale. Modern broilers receive high-protein feed through an automated feeding system, and artificial lighting is set to encourage eating and growth.

Sensors carry automation further in precision livestock farming, a set of electronic tools, including cameras, microphones and other sensors with their software, that monitors animals automatically to improve production, health and welfare and to reduce environmental impact. Large animals are tracked one by one, but poultry is tracked per flock, with the whole flock in a house treated as one animal, a method widely used in broilers. The variables it can monitor include welfare, infection, aggression, weight, and feed and water intake.

Vaccines, Antibiotics in Feed and the Colistin Ban

Health technology protects flocks of every size. Vaccination comes first; even backyard CARI Nirbheek chicks are vaccinated against Marek's disease, Newcastle disease and fowl pox during brooding.

Antibiotics have been added to poultry feed, both to check disease and as growth promoters. This use is regarded as one route to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the ability of microbes to survive the drugs meant to kill them. Resistance arises through spontaneous mutation, horizontal gene transfer and the selective pressure of antibiotic overuse in both medicine and agriculture; misuse, including the wrong drug, dose or duration, is a primary driver. Although the evidence linking antibiotic use in livestock directly to resistance is limited, the World Health Organization Advisory Group on Integrated Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance strongly recommended reducing the use of medically important antimicrobials in livestock.

India has also banned one antibiotic for farm use. On 19 July 2019, colistin and its formulations were prohibited for manufacture, sale and distribution for food-producing animals, poultry, aqua farming and animal feed supplements. Colistin is a last-resort treatment for multi-drug-resistant Gram-negative infections, and its use in food-producing animals has been linked to the spread of colistin-resistance genes.

Poultry Technology, Rural Enterprise and Government Support

Hatcheries and Feed Units as Rural Enterprises

Poultry technology creates work beyond the farm itself. The livestock sector provides alternative livelihoods to over 7 crore small and marginal farmers, including landless labourers, and poultry accounts for the largest share of India's livestock, 61 per cent. Moving rural workers from crop farming into allied activities such as poultry is a form of diversification, and hatcheries, parent farms, feed units and chick-rearing units are enterprises that employ people outside crop cultivation.

• Rural hatcheries: The Entrepreneurship Development Programme of the National Livestock Mission gives a 50 per cent capital subsidy to individuals, self-help groups, farmer producer organisations, cooperatives and Section 8 companies for a parent farm, rural hatchery and mother unit of at least 1,000 parent layers.
• Results so far: By July 2025, 208 poultry projects had been approved under it for the years 2021‑22 to 2025‑26, expected to create 1,201 jobs.
• Germplasm: Low input birds from the public institutions let these units serve households that cannot afford commercial feed.
• Infrastructure: The AHIDF finances feed plants and breed multiplication farms on a larger scale.

Technology alone does not spread poultry evenly. Commercial poultry is concentrated in the south, where Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana produced 18.37, 15.63 and 12.98 per cent of India's eggs in 2024‑25, while backyard poultry with low input birds remains the practical route in tribal and hill areas, where intensive-farm varieties cannot survive on free range.

Sources

• ICAR: CARI-NIRBHEEK, Pride of Backyard Poultry Farming
• ICAR: NBAGR Registers 16 New Livestock and Poultry Breeds
• ICAR: Indian Farming, January 2018 issue, Backyard Poultry Farming with Vanaraja and Srinidhi in Nagaland
• ICAR-Indian Institute of Maize Research: India Maize Scenario (archived copy)
• Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying: Operational Guidelines for the National Livestock Mission
• PIB: Release of Basic Animal Husbandry Statistics 2025
• PIB: Performance of National Livestock Mission
• PIB: National Livestock Mission
• PIB: Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund
• PIB: Projects under AHIDF
• PIB: Year End Review 2024, Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying
• PIB: Union Minister Launches the Realigned AHIDF Scheme
• PIB: Empowering India's Annadatas, Backgrounder
• PIB: Measures Taken to Check Rising Antimicrobial Resistance
• Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation: Notice on the colistin prohibition of 19 July 2019
• FAO: Poultry Sector Country Review, India
• NCERT: Indian Economic Development, Class XI, Rural Development
• Wikipedia: Hatchery
• Wikipedia: Incubator (egg)
• Wikipedia: Egg incubation
• Wikipedia: Chicken
• Wikipedia: Chick sexing
• Wikipedia: Broiler
• Wikipedia: Poultry feed
• Wikipedia: Poultry farming
• Wikipedia: Precision livestock farming
• Wikipedia: Asil chicken
• Wikipedia: Kadaknath
• Wikipedia: Gene mapping
• Wikipedia: Marker-assisted selection
• Wikipedia: Infection
• Wikipedia: Maize
• Wikipedia: Corn oil
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• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers