On The Large Clutch As A Measurement For Early Selection To Improve The Egg Production In Indigenous Chicken Strains

In recent years, the raising price of the eggs produced by indigenous chicken breeds leads an upsurge in the indigenous chicken breeding. Although some progresses have been made in indigenous chicken breeding, the egg production of indigenous chicken is still much lower than the elite chicken. Low annual breeding progress and long breeding cycle owing to lacking of proper and reliable index for early selection are considered to be responsible. The objection of this study was to evaluate the egg production, growth character and the egg quality of local indigenous chicken (XinHua chicken) by feeding hens of two generations separately. Records of 2908 chicken (The first generation:1396 and The second generation:1512) were subjected to genetic parameter analysis focusing on analysing the correlation between large clutch sizes and the 300d egg number together with the.egg quality. The possibility for indirect early egg production character selection using large clutch sizes and the correlation between large clutch sizes and egg quality were also studied in order to balance the weigh of characters selected for the breeding procedure.It is found that large clutch sizes mainly occured during 2-11 weeks after first laying, and ended in the age of 30 weeks, the heritability of LCS is 0.21 (realised heritability 0.37), which classified it to a medium to high heritability. The genetic correlation coefficient of LCS with 300EN is 0.65, and no significant unfavorable correlations between LCS and egg quality as well as growth characters were observed. By the indirect and direct selection based on the two generations eggs data,we found that,breeder selection according to the LCS and 300EN of The first generation and The second generation showed an identical rate of 76.4% and 75.5% of the hens respectively. Double LCS occurred to most of the hens in terms of individual egg-laying pattern, when double LCS was taken to consideration, the coincidence rate of indirect and direct selection are beyond 90%.Because of the short observation period, the strong correlation to 300NE and the absence of significant unfavorable correlation to egg quality, the indirect selection advantage effect is obvious, the LCS can be applied as an early selection index for egg production characters to shorten the generation interval, thus accelerate the breeding progress.