Shika Brown chicken breed faces extinction
…farmers ask FG to intervene
The over 20 years effort of the National Animal Production Research Institute (NAPRI), Zaria to develop the Nigerian chicken breed known as Shika Brown is about to go down the drain.
Daily Trust gathered that the breed was the first of any kind of genetic material to be registered in Nigeria in terms of animal source.
The Shika Brown layer was developed with special features to cater to the needs of most small and mediumscale farmers to increase their income by spending less on feed and vaccines.
A farmer can formulate feed using locally available materials for his poultry. The mortality rate for the Shika Brown, according to the institute, is just 5 per cent compared to the imported breed that can be as high as 50 to 60 per cent.
The institute stated that Shika Brown bird also lays more than the imported ones. For instance, if the imported ones lay for one year, the Shika Brown would lay for one and a half years and one needs little capital to start a farm with the birds.
But the Shika Brown breed is gradually disappearing from the Nigerian poultry industry as access to the birds by farmers has been on the decline for many years now.
At the just-concluded 3rd meeting of the National Animal Husbandry Development Committee (NAHDC) held in Nasarawa State, farmers and other stakeholders asked NAPRI officials about the current status of the Shika Brown. They noted that the breed seemed to have disappeared from the scene.
The farmers believed that the Shika Brown chicken breed should be revived given the current feed challenges facing the Nigerian poultry industry.
But Dr Sadiku Musa Otaru, a deputy director with the institute, told Daily Trust that they cannot mass-produce for the entire country.
Dr Otaru, who also spoke on other areas of animal production, said the institute’s main responsibility was to generate technology for uptake by others, including the business community, stressing that in the case of Shika Brown, the institute would need hatchery of higher capacity to produce numerous day-olds at a time and give them out which has been a problem, adding “Government did not come to our assistance over the years.”
Dr Joshua R. Tanko, Deputy Director in charge of Extension and Linkages, explains further saying: “As a research institute, ours is to develop the technology and then you now push it forth to the end-users to pick up.
“When we developed the Shika Brown, we tried to get hatcheries around the country where we would give the fertile eggs of the parent stock. With the parent stock, they will get the eggs that they would hatch in commercial quantity for sale poultry farmers.
“But we ran into a hitch because people were not coming for them. We tried and tried but it was not just working. So people were always coming to NAPRI but, you see, our capacity is just for research. So a lot of time, people will say that we have Shika Brown but that they can’t get it.
“The capacity we have is very limited, there’s no way we, as an Institute, can meet the demand of farmers around the country,’’ he explained.
The deputy director, however, assured that Shika Brown was still available, adding that scientists were working on how to improve the breed.
Dr Tanko also explained that the institute had made efforts to get additional genetic lines from abroad to improve what they currently have but that has not yielded result because of government bureaucracy.