The Rainbow chicken breed also known as the rainbow rooster is a quick-growing indian chicken breed that has now become popular in Uganda.
The breeds does well and are bred by Indbro Research and Breeding Farms in India. It is a multi-coloured cross breed that is suitable for organic chicken production and backyard farming.
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Rainbow Chicken Breed
The rainbow rooster suffers less fatality and lays more eggs. They are also very adaptive and can be kept in enclosed structures or free range.
Although similar to Uganda’s indigenous chicken the rainbow rooster grows faster are bigger and produce more eggs.
Brooding
The first ten days are the most important part of brooding. We recommend you brood in groups with 300 chicks as maximum.
Each brooder should be protected by a round guard with 4 bulbs should be hung at 3ft above the ground level, and the height adjusted, depending on the comfort and season of the birds.
During the cold weather, you can maintain room temperature by lighting charcoal stoves (sigiris).
You can also use wood dust or coffee husks to prepare the floor of the brooding house.
Provide a single drinker for every 50 chicks, which means that if the brooder has 200 chicks, you should have at least 4 waterers.
I once owned them and at 2 months and a half, they weighed around 2-4kg.
Each mature chicken can go for at least sh30,000 (294 USD)! . You should have one chicken per square metre if you are keeping them for meat and should have 1.5 square metres per chicken if keeping them for eggs.
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Feeding
You can feed them standard broiler foods followed by a finisher diet to get to market standard quickly.
In around 2 months, female rainbow roosters will weigh at least 1.2kg.nHowever, if you are keeping them for much longer, you can supplement their feeds with forage.
By eight weeks, the male rainbow roosters should weigh at least 2kg and at that time, they should have fed on not more than 4.9kg of chicken feeds.
When I had the rainbow chicken breed, I left them to freerange and they did well. Oh! Need I add that it tastes like a local chicken?
They eat almost everything and have a good feed conversion ratio.
That means that the food they consume build up meat in their body, compared to local breeds that consume so much, but take longer to grow.
Rainbow roosters lay at least 180 eggs per cycle. A cycle comprises eight months, which means the rooster lays at least 23 eggs per month, which is quite good, if you ask me.
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There you have it, let’s hear of your rainbow chicken breed stories via the comment section below.