The peculiarities of breeding organic chickens are that it is necessary to comply with ethical and production standards, however, this is possible. Crossing an ancient German chicken breed with a popular commercial egg-laying breed has produced a high-performance, dual-purpose cross, report Daniela Werner, Ralf Buscemasi and Lisa Baldinger of the Thünen Institute for Organic Farming. “For the production of chicken meat and eggs today, almost exclusively specialized chicken genotypes are used. At the same time, males from laying lines do not have satisfactory fattening indicators and are usually destroyed immediately after hatching. For ethical reasons, the practice was recently banned in Germany and France and alternatives need to be introduced, the breeders explain. - One such approach is to sex the embryos in the egg and save only those containing female embryos. Another alternative is to use dual-purpose genotypes, where females can be used for egg-laying and males for ...
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