Poultry production / by Leslie E. Card and Malden C. Nesheim.

  • Leslie Ellsworth Card
Date:
1972
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Poultry production / by Leslie E. Card and Malden C. Nesheim. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The Poultry Industry 9 Fig. 1-5.—A midget and a normal breeder compared. (Courtesy of Indian River Poultry Farms, Lancaster, Pa.) separately from farm-raised chickens, the U. S. total was 34 million, about 4 per cent of the total chicken meat supply. Production in¬ creased, by successive ten-year intervals, from 106 million in 1939 to 513 million in 1949; 1,731 million in 1959; and 2,788 million in 1969. Broilers now account for over 90 per cent of all chicken meat consumption, and about 17 per cent of the combined total of chicken, turkey and red meat. This rapid expansion has been possible largely because of the nation-wide increase in average egg production. Since fewer hens were needed to produce the nation's eggs, fewer farm-raised chickens were grown relative to human food needs, and about one-third of the crop consisted of pullets instead of straight-run chicks of both sexes. This left a gap to be filled by commercial broilers. But production alone was not enough. New methods of process¬ ing, packaging and distribution, especially the retaihng of fresh- killed and frozen ready-to-cook broilers, and the fact that such broilers were widely available at a favorable price when compared with other meats, favored an increase in consumption. During the 2
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