this study aims to compare anatomies of madagascar chickens (indigenous race and starbro strain). with 8,262 individuals of either indigenous races or starbro strain chickens raised in a suburban environment, the weights of different pieces of cut as well as the live weights before slaughter were determined. results showed that breast development presents a positive linear relationship with thi...

Despite a shortage of animal feed in Iran, cereal stubble is often underutilized due to agro-economic reasons. On the other hand, lambs fed with a conventional fattening ration deposit a considerable amount of fat; therefore, this experiment was conducted aimed at better utilization of cereal stubble and reducing the fat content of lamb carcasses. Fat-tailed Mehraban and Ghezel ram lambs were p...

Pig farms in the Netherlands producing boars have different levels of boar taint prevalence, as assessed by sensory evaluation with the human nose at the slaughter line. With a questionnaire to 152 Dutch pig producers (response rate 59%), farm and management characteristics were identified that are potentially associated with farm-level boar taint prevalence. Lower farm-level boar taint prevale...

In many sheep production operations in the Midwestern and Eastern U.S., lambs are managed for maximum body weight gain and fed high-energy diets continuously from shortly after birth until they are marketed as slaughter lambs. Flock owners will replace 20 to 25% of the ewes in their flock each year with ewe lambs raised in their flock or purchased from other producers. Since all lambs in a floc...

One of the most labor intensive tasks of traditional slaughter pig production is the weighting of pigs for market. In an on-going project, methods for automatically assessing live weights through image analysis are being developed. Below, we present the framework of a farm level model to optimize selection of slaughter pigs for market. The optimization tool used in this study is a hierarchical ...