Abstract

Chicken production plays an important role in providing human food consumption, growth of domestic products, and creating employment opportunities in Ethiopia. By considering this, the present paper aims to deliver, synthesize, and summarize the compiled information on the existing status and prospects of chicken production. The poultry sector can be characterized into different production systems based on selected parameters like breed, flock size, housing, feeding, health, technology, biosecurity and others. Attempts have been made to introduce different exotic poultry breeds to small holder farming systems of Ethiopia to improve the existing low performance of indigenous chickens. Among these, Rhode Island Red, Fayoumi, Potchefstroom Koekoek, Sasso, Bovan Brown, Issa Brown, and Leghorn are being kept under various husbandry systems. Besides, indigenous chicken ecotypes have wide ranges of morphological and phenotypic variation within and among them accounts about 90.9% out of 60.5 million. The ecotypes such as barley plumage color, red plumage color, white plumage color, and black plumage color have been characterized in the country and distributed across different agro-ecological zones. The average annual egg production of indigenous and exotic chicken breeds did not exceed 60 and 250 eggs, respectively. The age at first egg ranges from 6-7 months indicating late maturity. Major Challenges of chicken production in Ethiopia were sudden diseases outbreak, predation, low genetic quality, market instability, feed source scarcity and weak extension service. A rapidly increasing human population, greater purchasing power/rising incomes and increasing urbanization of the country are responsible prospects for a growing demand and consumption for poultry products. Therefore, mindfulness should be emphasized on enhancing the improvement of chicken farming systems for better production and reproduction performance.