Breeding Practices and Trait Preferences of Indigenous Chicken Farmers at Madiga Village, Polokwane Local Municipality, South Africa

Abstract

Background: Understanding of breeding practices and traits preferences of the communal farmers is the bottom-up approach where livestock specialists assist farmers to identify and understand their production challenges before designing an improvement program. This study was conducted to identify the socio-economic status, breeding practices, production systems and trait preferences of chicken keepers at Madiga village, Limpopo province. Methods: A total of 38 chicken farmers out of 62 were administered a well-structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square test were used to analyse and test the significance among the gender respectively. Result: The results showed that the breeding practices were not significantly affected by gender (p greater than 0.05). Almost all the farmers in Madiga village were keeping indigenous breeds. The results indicated that the majority of the farmers were improving their indigenous chickens mainly by pure breeding. The most common trait preferences of farmers in breeding cocks were body size, mating ability and growth rate while in breeding hens they were mothering ability, hatchability and growth rate. This study indicated that pure breeding, culling and both controlled and uncontrolled mating system were the most common breeding practices in Madiga village. This study might help to attract animal scientists to develop a multipurpose chicken breed that will express the traits preferred by farmers under village production environment and promote chicken production and food security as a result.