Improvement of village chicken production

Animal production in general and chickens and small ruminants in particular play important socioeconomic roles in developing countries. Production of village chickens is a source of easy and regular income for rural farmers in developing countries in general and in Burkina Faso in particular. Unfortunally efforts to improve this production system were not very effective and village chickens still have low productivity. Due to the roles of village chickens, the Strategic Research Plan of Burkina Faso recommended to invest in gathering knowledge on this production and in conducting research for the improvement of the system. The current study started with surveys and literature reviews to analyse the existing production systems at farm level. Special attention was given to farmers' practices and to identification of local feed resources and their use. Secondly studies were designed in order to improve the most common village chicken production systems based on scavenging. System analyses showed that mixed village chicken and sheep fattening could be used for improvement of village chicken production system and subsequent income generation at rural farm level.