Poultry (Meat and Eggs)

Poultry egg and meat are important sources of high quality proteins, minerals and vitamins to balance the human diet. Specially developed breeds of egg type chicken are now available with an ability of quick growth and high feed conversion efficiency. Depending on the farm-size, layer (for eggs) farming can be main source of family income or can provide subsidiary income and gainful employment to farmers throughout the year. Poultry manure has high fertilizer value and can be used for increasing yield of all crops.

The popularity of poultry meat among consumers is attributed to the absence of any social or religious taboos associated with poultry meat consumption, its characteristics, such as nutrition, low fat, and higher content of desirable unsaturated fatty acids, and the light flavor of poultry meat making it ideal for use in various traditional and processed meat products. It is well suited with flavorings, and most of the fat lies at the subcutaneous layer, which can be easily removed when compared to red meat. Also, there are other advantages such as quick and better economic returns of poultry due to better feed conversion ratio, rapid growth, uniformity of size and specialized breeding making automation easy, better biosafety measures due to the application of the All-in-All-out concept, small body size of poultry, more uniformity in composition and color, low cost of production, vertical integration, and automation. The automation in poultry processing is successful owing to the production of birds having similar appearance and conformity. Due to the adaptation of advanced management practices during breeding, management, and feeding, it is relatively simple to breed birds similar in appearance and composition to its siblings (carbon copy). This uniformity in size is the key for success in the automation of the poultry industry, and at present, line speeds up to 150 units/min is easily achieved