Proposed Measure of Performance Efficiency in Laying Hens

FOR many years, percent production was regarded as a most useful criterion in appraising the value of laying hens. Although it remains as one of the best efficiency indicators, measures of additional factors such as egg weight, egg quality, body weight and feed consumption have been utilized in the sophistication of productive analyses (Kleiber, 1965). With the development of commercial laying stocks which routinely attain the desired 57 gram egg weight, the measure of feed efficiency has, for the past decade, concerned itself with the relationship of feed consumed to eggs produced (Ewing, 1963; Card and Nesheim, 1966). This has been a convenient partial measure of performance efficiency. It is simple to use feed efficiency values for the calculation of profit, as they relate to cost of feed and to egg price, but with the inverse relationship between high efficiency and numerical values for feed efficiency, an unnecessary barrier to . . .