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.

Rearing of scavenging chickens is among the most commonly practiced farm activities in Ethiopia. This system is dominated by indigenous chickens. Output from indigenous chickens is low due to poor management and absence of intense selection that is intended to improve economically important traits. This showed that village chickens are rather evolved for adaptation traits. However, the level of risk is low, and this has made rearing of scavenging chickens a choice of farm activity for smallholder farmers. The objective of this study was to characterize the scavenging chickens' production system in Wolaita Zone. Single-visit survey involving individual interview of 119 farmers and 6 focus group discussions was used to collect the data. Our results showed that rearing of scavenging chickens was constrained especially by disease and predation problems. However, farmers proposed a set of solutions to minimize the effect of these problems. Rearing of scavenging chickens fulfils the multi-functional need of the society. This system has special features because it can sustain in its own without the need for modern commercial chicken farming facilities. However, farmers also reported the drawbacks of rearing of scavenging chickens and these mainly include uproot of garden crops and tiresomeness of the night watching. Selection of chickens was mainly depending on physically observed traits like body size and plumage colour. The initial foundation flock was mainly obtained from the local market. The ideal place for scavenging chickens production is the one that has intermediate weather condition and has some trees that can be used as shade; however, it was substantiated that it has to be free from bush and shrubs, weeds and wet lands. Therefore, these pieces of knowledge embedded among smallholder farmers need to be well documented and synthesized to design an appropriate type of technology packages that can be communicated back to farmers to improve productivity of the scavenging chickens.

Indigenous village chickens (IVCs) display a wide variation in production performance and reproductive characteristics. This variation is ascribed to genetic and environmental factors and gene-environment interactions. This work reports the results of a cross-sectional study recorded using a face-to-face interview of 119 small-scale farmers regarding their insights on production performance and reproductive characteristics of IVCs. It was reported that pullets were sexually mature on average at the age of 5.5 months and cockerels at 6 months. This comparatively early sexual maturity by the standards of IVCs might be attributed to the impact of uncontrolled gene flow from production breeds. However, there is a wide variation in age at sexual maturity at an individual bird’s level. It was found that pullets mature earlier than cockerels (t = 3.250, df = 159, p = 0.001, 95%: CI -0.670, -0.166). Reportedly, local hens on average laid 14 eggs per clutch. The mean number of clutches per year was 4, which could culminate in the yearly production of 56 eggs. A significantly large proportion of the respondents reported that the warm season is an ideal time for laying eggs (96.7%) and brooding chicks (94.1%). During the dry season, the scavenging feed resource is relatively abundant, the risk of infection is comparatively low, and the warm weather is suitable for laying eggs and brooding chicks. IVCs possess a long reproductive lifetime, i.e., on average 3 years in hens and 2 years in cocks, which makes them more productive than has been anticipated. For example, this study found that a hen on average can lay 174 eggs and hatch 58 chicks in its average reproductive lifetime of 3 years. The high intrapopulation variation observed in the performance of IVCs can be used in genetic improvement programs.

Indigenous village chickens, marketing system, smallholder farmers, middlemen, drivers of the market demand.

In developing nations, indigenous village chickens, or IVCs, significantly contribute to rural livelihoods. IVCs are well-suited for small-scale farmers' multiple breeding objectives and low-input, low-output production systems. Although natural selection has a disproportionate impact on the genetic structure of IVCs, small-scale farmers have developed locally tailored breeding practices to get the most out of their flocks. Small-scale farmers' insights on traits and breed preferences and family flock breeding management are presented in this cross-sectional study. Small-scale farmers prefer IVCs that are optimally good in several traits. In contrast to policymakers, who frequently underestimate the significance of IVCs in rural life, small-scale farmers have a balanced view and acknowledge the coexistence of local and commercial chickens. Farmers are unable to achieve their breeding goals by keeping IVCs or production breeds because of the complexity of their breeding goals; instead, this aspiration needs the rearing of both types of chickens. Only 15.7 percent of farmers recruited homegrown cocks to breed their chickens, whereas 84.3 percent outsourced breeding cocks (47.9 percent from the local market and 36.4 percent from neighbors) (χ-squared = 15.976 df = 2, p = 0.0003395). This practice is important to reduce the negative impacts of inbreeding. About 49.2 percent of small-scale farmers believed that consanguineous mating-induced inbreeding had only minor effects. High flock turnover and uncontrolled breeding significantly reduce the rate of inbreeding. Despite the low production of eggs and meat, small-scale farmers prefer local (rank = 1.47) chickens to commercial (rank = 1.61). Farmers' preferences are influenced by the wide range of products and services offered by IVCs. For cocks, fertility, and growth traits were highly sought after, whereas for hens, maternal traits and laying performance were prioritized. Compared to the highlands, the lowlands had a longer egg storage period (t = 2.677, df = 117, p = 0.009, 95 percent CI: -3.7607, -0.5622). The low demand for eggs in the sparsely populated lowland region may be linked to this extended storage, which was practiced regardless of the higher temperature in the lowland region. This study acknowledges the wisdom of small-scale farmers and advocates the incorporation of their insights into a sustainable genetic improvement program.