Village chickens management in Wolaita zone of southern Ethiopia.

Little effort has been made to improve village chickens housing, feeding, and health care. Due to this, the amount of output obtained is usually low. The aim of this study was to elicit farmers' knowledge on the routine husbandry practices of village chickens. One hundred nineteen farmers were one-on-one interviewed in the highland and lowland areas of Wolaita zone (southern Ethiopia) to generate the dataset used in this analysis. We found that all the respondents supplemented the scavenging chickens with locally available feed resources. However, the amount of supplementary feeds provided hardly meets the nutritional requirement of the flock. As a result, farmers were forced to practice a sort of preferential feeding mainly based on laying performance and the scavenging ability of different classes of the family flock. Moreover, there is a wide difference in the amount and type of feed available among seasons. This variation has forced farmers to resort on strategic supplementation to overcome the adverse effect of inherent feed (grain) scarcity on chickens' performance especially during wet season. Feed loss should be kept at a minimum by using feeding troughs, and a fraction of money obtained from selling of the chickens and eggs needs to be set aside to purchase feed. The risk of disease was higher during main rain season (June to September). Besides providing sanitary condition and feed supplementation, capacitating the veterinary service and validating the efficacy of ethno-veterinary practices through objective studies is required to improve the health status of village chickens. Majority of the farmers use rudimentary types of in-house built shelters to protect their chickens from adverse effects of bad weather, predation, and theft. This indicates the importance of constructing proper types of shelters from locally (freely) available or inexpensive materials. The existing tradition of responsibility sharing among family members while doing the routine husbandry practices needs to be strengthened to maximize the efficient use of family's labor force. This improvement plan needs to be mainly implemented through adoption of the existing best traditional practices and through the rational use of cheap and readily available local resources.