In an attempt to ensure sufficient supplies of healthy and delicious chicken meat for Da Nang’s residents, the Hoa Vang District authorities and the city’s Agro-forestry-fishery Promotion Centre have jointly implemented a backyard chicken raising model ensuring biological safety.

High-capacity incubatorshave been given to chicken raising families

Mr Thieu Dung, a resident in the district’s Hoa Phong Commune, said he transformed an around 700m² tree-covered garden into his farm for raising a total of 120 hens and 25 cocks.

These chickens are allowed to range freely instead of being kept in coops as other varieties do to satisfy their need for ample living space, and they are fed rice, cornmeal and other types of poultry feed.

Mr Dung said the chickens which are raised through the application of biological safety principles stand out from those raised in large-scale industrial farms.

Free-range chickens are less prone to disease than industrially-raised ones.

Free-range chickens are raised naturally so that their eggs have a bigger yolk and better flavour than eggs from industrially-raised chickens. 

The price of home-raised chickens is double that of mass-produced ones, thereby bringing higher profits to farmers. 

Mr Dung’s backyard chickens now lay a daily average of 25 eggs in total, which are put into incubators to help them hatch.

This man has sold a total of over 300 fledglings, which have all been bought or ordered by clients across the city.

Ten-day-old fledglings are being sold at between 13,000 VND and 14,000 apiece. 

Mr Dung happily said he earns a monthly profit of between 2.5 million VND and 3 million VND from the sales of chickens with a high economic value.

There is an upward trend in the consumption of backyard chickens thanks to their tasty and healthy meat.

In comparison with traditionally-raised chicken which are roaming all day to search out much of their foods, ones raised through the application of biological safety techniques bring more economic benefits to raisers.

It takes only about 4 months to raise chickens weighing 1.5kg apiece, ready to go on sale.

Since 2016, the Agro-forestry-fishery Promotion Centre has donated a total of about 3,500 breeding chickens, along with poultry feed and high-capacity incubators to farmers in the rural communes of Hoa Nhon, Hoa Phong and Hoa Phu in suburb Hoa Vang District.

A total of 60 farm families have attended short-term training courses on backyard chicken raising techniques.

The trainees were introduced to measures to choose robust, disease-free breeding chickens, and good-quality poultry feed. In addition, they learned more about temperature and incubation times for chickens, and environmental sanitation methods.

Besides chickens, biological safety techniques are now being applied in raising such types of livestock as cows and pigs in a bid to ensure the sustainable development of husbandry industry.