Status of Sonali Chicken Farming in Rajshahi Division, Bangladesh : An Updated Survey

Current status of Sonali chicken farming in Rajshahi Division has been assessed and interpreted in the present study during a period of one year from March 2019 to February 2020. Data on some socioeconomic parameters of Sonali farming such as farm age, shed types, farmers’ education and training, bio-safety measures, and availability of bank loan and help from the Department of Livestock Services (DLS) were considered for 41 randomly selected poultry farms from six adjacent districts, namely, Bogura (n=4), Joypurhat (n=4) Natore (n=6), Pabna (n=4), Rajshahi (n=20) and Sirajgonj (n=3). Moreover, both farmers’ and consumers’ attitudes toward Sonali chickens, consumers’ demand and the prevailing marketing systems of the birds were evaluated during the study. District-, farm- and season-wise variations in day-old chick (DOC) price, number of marketable chickens produced per farm, mortality, and prices of live Sonali, broiler (Cobb 500) and Deshi (indigenous, non-descript) chickens along with profitability components like feed cost, medicinal cost, miscellaneous costs, gross cost (GC), gross return (GR), net profit (NP) and profitability index (PI) per flock were estimated. Finally, associations between socioeconomic parameters and productivity, mortality and profitability components have been assessed and interpreted. Findings of the present survey are quite encouraging, which clearly demonstrated that Sonali chicken farming is a popular, commercially viable and profitable enterprise in study area