The norms set under contract farming by the companies, the farmers added, were in sharp contrast to the routine farming where mortality rate of the birds goes beyond 10 percent, expenditure on medicine sometimes exceeds Rs five per bird, and cost on labor, sawdust, and electricity is more than Rs 3. Many poultry farmers toldGreater Kashmir that in contract farming the conditions that the companies prescribe to the farmers are difficult. It is ironic that our state has not learned anything...

Cushing, who juggles a hectic lifestyle that includes a myriad of projects, including her own line of olive oil and tomato sauces, as well as a new cookbook called Pure Food coming out this fall, says she thoroughly researched the poultry industry before taking on her ambassadorship. Cushing, who juggles a hectic lifestyle that includes a myriad of projects, including her own line of olive oil and tomato sauces, as well as a new cookbook called Pure Food coming out this fall, says she...

The small family farm is vanishing, being replaced by large, multi-level operations specializing in different elements of farming such as dairy and beef, or poultry and egg operations. There are now more than 5,900 farms across Canada with gross receipts in excess of $1 million, a whopping 27 per cent increase in just five years. Bigger farms bring in more money, but also cost more to run, so the census is somewhat misleading when it points to the number of million-dollar farming...

Chickens have been part of rural backyards long before poultry became an industry. The idea was to keep the benefits of poultry within the countryside while making it more profitable for the housewives who rear the chickens. Poultry corporate Keggfarms has returned to these very backyards as part of its rural poultry programme. This was achieved by genetically breeding high-yielding chickens, called kuroilers, and supplying them to the village women. Vinod Kapur, the 72-year-old founder of...

Third in a series of reports on deadling with the threat from avian influenza. Yet people often do not follow the rules about preventing bird flu. What happens if you follow all these rules and someone in your family gets sick? How will you know if it is bird flu? People who could be infected with the bird flu virus will have difficulty breathing. Most bird flu cases in human beings have resulted from people touching infected farm birds, such as chickens, ducks or turkeys. The government...