Agriculture Business Week

It used to be that the Sasso chicken from France was very popular with a lot of local growers, especially the smaller raisers that included backyard raisers and hobbyists. Of course, the Sasso also appealed to those with commercial intentions.

In the first several years, many raisers praised the plump body of the bird, its fast growth, its sturdiness and of course its taste that resembles that of the native chicken. The big difference, however, is that the Sasso meat is more tender.

In the past few years, however, many of the growers have become disgruntled. Their chickens did not grow as fast and as big as before. One municipality in Pangasinan dispersed thousands of Sasso chicks several years ago. The intention was to improve the chickens the small farmers were growing. The recipients are not really impressed now. An expatriate and his Filipino wife in Abra used to have a commercial operation raising Sasso chicken in their resort and selling dressed birds as well as liver pate and other processed chicken meat. They have slowed down in their business as the latest chicks they obtained, according to them, did not perform as well as they used to do.
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Posted on October 6th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Chicken, Sasso, Sunshine Chicken. Comments: None

A forestry expert has found that chicken feathers can he recycled into a low-cost, lightweight, and decay-resistant composite panel for use as building material for housing and construction.

He is Dr. Menandro Acda, a professor in the University of the Philippines Los Banos College of Forestry and Natural Resources where he has been working on his project called “Recycling Waste Chicken Feathers for Low-cost Building Material” since last year. This project was one of the 2007 grantees under the Ford Conservation & Environmental Grants Program.

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Posted on September 28th, 2008 under Poultry, Special Report. Tags: Chicken, Construction. Comments: None

With rising feed costs, high inflation rate and low farm gate prices, experts say there ought to be a paradigm shift to alleviate the status of the egg industry.

In the recently concluded 2nd Egg Summit held at the Department of Agriculture’s main office early last month, Robina Farms’ William Lim challenged the participants who came to the event to aim for a better and more viable egg industry by way of acquiring a paradigm shift. “A different mind set is what we need in order to address the issues of the industry,” Lim emphatically said.

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Posted on September 24th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Egg, Layers. Comments: 1

Experts consider them as unintelligible birds, but the turkey meat is hailed as one of, if not the healthiest of meats.

Engineer Gil Victor P. Quizon, owner of Herbest Turkey Products, only started his business a year ago but based on his experiences, he said there is so much potential in raising this popular form of large poultry bird. Last Christmas alone, he has one customer who bought from him Php20,000 worth of dressed turkey. “At that time, I think I was able to butcher and dress about 200 heads of turkeys,” he disclosed. “My customers gave them as corporate gifts and I couldn’t fill the market anymore. Ako na mismo ang sumuko.
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Posted on September 20th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Turkey. Comments: 1

Do these big birds augur well in Philippine business? A German farm manager says it can - but some rules have to be followed.

Albeit there’s been a mounting demand for ostriches in the international market, the Philippines doesn’t seem to consider such a presage for business opportunity. A Nueva Ecija-based ostrich farm, for one, says that in order to meet the demands abroad, all ostrich growers in the country should have to work at one fell swoop.

Michael Gross, farm manager and owner of the Gross Ostrich Farm, one of the largest ostrich cultivators in the Philippines, concedes that his yield is pretty small to export ostrich livestock and products. And although there are some entrepreneurs and consumers abroad who want to acquire his livestock and products, he just shrugs off his shoulders and says: “Maybe one day we can export.”

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Posted on August 29th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Ostrich. Comments: 2

Dr. Raymond de Asis, a respected veterinarian, briefs us on the basics of starting a backyard broiler business.

The deluge of inquiries and phone calls in our office regarding the basics of poultry production and the mechanics of starting up a broiler business has prompted us to devote an article (a cover story, no less) on the topic. We’ve consulted with Dr. Raymond Peter G. de Asis, a veterinarian, and animal science expert who operates his own broiler business to shed light on the ABCs of broiler production.

The 32-year-old broiler expert is a master’s degree holder of animal science major in nutrition and minor in biochemistry from the University of the Philippines in Los Banos. It was also in the same state university where he obtained his doctor of veterinary medicine in 1988. Dr. de Asis is an active member of the United Broilers Association (UBRA). The following are excerpts from our interview:

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Posted on August 19th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Broiler, Chicken. Comments: None

The right strategy in breeding livestock and poultry is more important than you think. That is why Dr. Syrian Baguio, assistant director of the Livestock Research Division of Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), is worried. There are so many breeds of goats being imported and if everybody is going to breed and crossbreed without the right strategy (bara-bara in Tagalog), he is afraid the goat industry could be “mongrelized.” Mongrels, he explained, don’t have predictable performance.

He is afraid that growers would be crossing different kinds of animals without really having specific targets in mind. That could result in mongrel animals. When that happens, the offspring could be very variable. There’s no uniformity and that is bad for a commercial operation. Using the best-looking animals (the products of crossing) is not the best way to breed. That is often a mistake, according to Dr. Baguio. What is more important is to produce a pure or purified line with the right genes for breeding purposes. A purified line could be achieved through sustained selection until the animals produced are uniform in size, appearance, productivity, adaptability and other attributes.
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Posted on August 18th, 2008 under Livestock, Poultry. Comments: None

Here’s a fearless forecast on what’s brewing for poultry breeders and broiler raisers.

The poultry industry is now on the threshold of a new scientific expansion in genetic improvement through molecular breeding. Established breeding practices, inspired by quantitative genetics, treat the animal as a black box with an imprecise number of genes that dictate its varied characteristics.

The 1980s significantly mark this technological timeline, where, slowly but surely, this black box was opened. The first major development that changed the surface of poultry breeding was the discovery of genetic markers. Genetic markers that shape the most widely used category were small anonymous repeat sequences of DNA called micro satellites that are scattered across the entire genome and can be used as landmarks to create a map of the genome.

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Posted on August 6th, 2008 under Poultry. Tags: Broiler, Chicken, Poultry. Comments: None

Successful entrepreneurs do not spawn out of sheer luck. If in case they do, they become mere flashes in the pan whose shining streaks hastily fade into oblivion. Businessman Ronnie Mendoza, the president of Kaizen Foods Enterprises, Inc., knows this by heart. This is why in his 1,300 square-meter poultry dressing plant in Marilao, Bulacan, the 41-year-old entrepreneur makes sure that things don’t get muddled and de-focused. Hygiene must be properly maintained and equipment should be constantly checked and rechecked. “Time and motion are very important here,” he quips. “Even a slight error could delay the process and that means we can be penalized by our clients.”

Indeed, focus and timing are two business lessons which Mendoza has learned to inculcate over the years to his 13o employees, all of whom are members of the United Services Multipurpose Cooperative, an organization which Mendoza initiated and organized. “As members of the cooperative, they know that they have a stake in the business so everybody makes sure they are as focused as me,” he explains. “Otherwise, all of us will fail and fall.”

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Posted on August 5th, 2008 under Entrepreneurs, Poultry. Tags: Chicken, Entrepreneurs. Comments: None