Jie Wen
Institute of Animal Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Based on data from the FAO, China’s total egg production in 2010 had reached 28.0 MMT, a distant number one in the world, and has occupied that position for more than 25 years. In 1985, poultry meat accounted only 8% of total meat production while in 2010 this percentage had increased to 21% with a total poultry meat production of 17.0 MMT. FAO data indicated that China’s output of duck meat was at 2.7 MMT and goose meat at 2.4 MMT, which represented 68% and 96% of the world output, respectively.
In the recent survey on poultry genetic resources, organized by Ministry of Agriculture between 2004 to 2007, there are 172 native poultry resources, including 107 chickens, 32 ducks, 30 geese, 2 pigeons and 1turkey. Up to now, 41 poultry breeds were listed in the Conservation Directory of Animal Genetic Resources, 4 gene pools and 30 national conservation farms has been established. At present, the conservation of poultry resources in China has mainly adopted two methods, i.e., in-situ and ex-situ conservation, which are conducted at live, cell and gene levels. The dwarf gene (dw gene) was fine mapped and exploited successfully both in egg-type and quality chicken breeding and production. Quality and disease resistance breeding of poultry are making progress, while molecular detection for some quality trait genes, such as rate of feather development gene and dw gene and recessive white gene, is applied in the commercial breeding and production. Following the development of new breed Jinghong 1 and Jingfen 1 and Nongda 3, layer breeds changed from imports dominated to current equal share with domestic breeds. From 1998 to 2010, the state has examined and approved 34 new breeds of color-feathered chicken, which had greatly promoted the development of yellow-feathered broiler and make it account for nearly 50% of the total meat-type chicken marketing volume.
Bionic Digestion System for Poultry has been developed for fast evaluating the bioavailability of feedstuff with a better repeatability, precision and comparability. Based on local feedstuffs and ingredients, progress has been made on nutrient requirements of color-feathered chicken and Beijing Duck. With the improvement on housing and relevant facilities, layer production started to shift from the traditional northern region to the southern major consumption area. To increase the production efficiency, cage-rearing system for meat-type chicken is gradually accepted by more and more enterprises. Levels of standardization, scale production and automation are increasingly improved in poultry production.