XN000022-1973-12-30 — Page 4

Sunday, December 30, 1973.

The inoculation and vaccination programmes of the Department

had been successful in containing these diseases by the prevention of widespread epidemics and thus limiting them from causing financial danages to the farmers.

The Department's Castle Peak Poultry Breeding Centre provides inoculation and vaccination services. Advice and preventive medicine were also given to the farmers for their fowls.

Farmers wishing to have good quality chicks for raising can buy then from the Centre's Poultry Production Unit where three flocks - Cantonese, Wai Chow and New Hampshire are maintained for hatching chicks and eggs.

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Apart from the family-type farms, he said there were several large enterprise-type farms which were well managed and equipped.

The largest of them, the Kau Hing Farm at Sek Kong, occupies a site of 210,000 square feet with an annual output of about 100,000 chickens.

The spokesman went on to say that the rising costs in chicken feed had posed difficulties to the farmers.

The cost of chicken feed, especially that of maize, is the

chief economic concern of the farmers.

"Higher feed cost discourage them from carrying out bold expansion plans. Last year, the local chicken production decreased by 14 per cent as a result of higher cost of imported chicken feed,"

Due to reduced production of maize in Thailand which is the main source of supply of the crop, the price of maize last year rose from $32 to $60 a picul in Hong Kong.

However, he said the price of maize had dropped by more than 20 per cent since the early part of this year, thus enabling the farmers to sell their products at competitive prices again,

"In order to maintain local products at a competitive position, there is a need for ways to be worked out to avoid production cost being affected by fluctuation of chicken feed-cost," the spokesman observed.

/Farmers

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