800 chicken die in Tamil Nadu

The poultry industry in Tamil Nadu, which is slowly recovering after the outbreak of avian flu, suffered another blow on Friday when more than 800 chicken at a poultry farm perished at Moperipalayam, 25 km from here.

This was the first time that a mass death of chicken was reported in the district, the hub of the organised commercial broiler farming in the South.

Officials from the animal husbandry department, the health department and representatives from the poultry growers' association, who arrived at the village where the farm is located, said that the death was caused by starvation and not due to bird flu.

The dead birds were part of the 6,000-odd chicken housed at the Moperipalayam poultry farm. However, the remaining 5,000-odd birds were healthy, a BCC official told Business Standard.

Reliable sources said that a Coimbatore-based integrated poultry farm, which took this farm on contract, failed to supply feed for the past one week and the poultry farmer had stopped feeding the live-birds to cut down losses.

The officials claimed that the birds, kept unfed for nearly a week in the farm, showed a cannibalistic behaviour and began fatally pecking each other and died.

The animal husbandry department collected 20 samples from live birds as well as from the dead birds and they would be sent for examination at the Central Referral Laboratory in Chennai.

This incident has brought to the fore the severe economic blow suffered by the poultry farmers and the integrated poultry operators in the recent weeks by way of loss of chicken sale ever since the bird flu hit the country last month.

With most poultry farmers being engaged by the major integrated poultry producers as contract broiler producers, they depend on the integrators for all inputs including feed.

In order to check losses, most poultry farms across the State are believed to have stopped feeding birds.

A commercial broiler bird for sale at an optimum body weight of 2 kg consumes 3.5 kg of feed worth Rs 35. But the present market rate for broiler at Rs 10 a kg does not even cover half of the feed cost that works out around Rs 20 -25, a BCC official told.