Poultry meat is the cheapest source of protein globally, including Bangladesh. It is reported that only 7% of broiler birds are reared in an integrated system by large private farms in our country. About 50% of our farmers are smallholders (< 3000 bird) and they have a significant contribution to broiler production. However, these smallholder farmers sometimes incur a loss due to the lack of proper management of flocks and poor Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR). The FCR is a pivotal indicator for measuring poultry feed efficiency that determines the feed requirement in kg per kg body weight gain. The Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) mainly depends on quality feed ingredients, especially the nutrition contents of the feed and strain of broiler. Unfortunately, the smallholder farmers sometimes use low-quality (substandard) feed, which often results in higher FCR and an increase in production cost, as feed cost becomes about 60% to 70% of the total production cost. It is found that the FCR of different broiler strains in our country varies from 1.50 to 1.70 (Islam et al., 2019 and field data) at 30 days, which is comparatively higher than the standard FCR of 1.42 to 1.46. Therefore, making farmers aware of the use of quality feed along with good management practice is crucial to further improve FCR, increase income, and sustain in this competitive market. There is a confusion that leather wastes are used in poultry feed. There should be no reason for this since it will not give better FCR.

Dr. F H Ansarey
Managing Director & CEO
ACI Agribusiness

Broiler Feed Pellet (in left) and Broiler Bird Consuming Feed Pellets (in right) Photo Source: Collected