Plucking Great Times: An Informal History Of Tautau Chicken

This is not intended to be any type of Pulitzer Prize style of document but a set of notes about the three decades or so that we were involved in the poultry industry from the late 1960s through to the early 2000s. It is hoped that future generations may get some understanding of the evolution of the industry that we stumbled into! Consumption of chicken per head of population the time we started was about 2.5kg per person per year. In the 2000s it was about 35kg per person per year and still increasing. At the same time there was a dramatic improvement in livestock performance through genetics, feed and environment. When we started it took about 65 days for a chicken to grow to 1.7kg live weight and consume about 3kg of food for every kg of liveweight. (FCR). Now a 2.7kg chicken can grow in 37 days with a FCR of just 1.55 - nearly half of 40 years ago!