Broilers are chickens bred specifically for meat production. They are selected for traits like growth rate, feed efficiency, meat yield, health, and welfare. Broilers are raised to different weights depending on whether they will be sold whole, as cuts, or used in value-added products like ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat foods.

A broiler breeder is a parent bird that lays the eggs that will hatch into broilers. Unlike broilers, breeders are not raised for meat, but are carefully managed to ensure a consistent supply of healthy chicks. Without healthy breeders, the supply of meat chickens would be less reliable.

“Factory farming” is an informal and misleading term often used to describe large-scale poultry production. It was coined to suggest that intensive production or intensive agriculture is inherently bad or negative. In reality, modern poultry systems use advanced breeding, responsible management practices, and technology to raise chickens efficiently, while supporting bird welfare, food safety, and security.

A primary poultry breeding company focuses on developing pure line (pedigree) chickens through scientific, performance data-driven genetic selection of naturally bred animals over multiple generations. The primary poultry breeding company sits at the top of the poultry meat supply chain and sells the grandparent and parent stock (broiler breeders) that supply healthy chicks to poultry producers around the world. Through advanced genetics and careful selection over generations, breeding programs aim to improve animal health, welfare, production efficiency, and robustness.

Aviagen is a global leader in primary poultry breeding, providing breeding stock to poultry producers worldwide as part of its mission to help feed the world with affordable, nutritious chicken.

By producing birds that grow efficiently and convert feed into high-quality protein with fewer resources, modern poultry breeding also supports more sustainable food production.

Chickens are selected through careful breeding programs that identify parent birds with desirable traits. At Aviagen, this process is enhanced by innovative technologies that improve the accuracy of selection criteria and enable advanced data analysis, combined with decades of breeding expertise. These methods help produce healthy, productive, and resilient birds naturally, without the use of genetic modification.

Aviagen’s balanced breeding approach is a genetic selection strategy that advances multiple traits at the same time—health, welfare, sustainability, and production performance. As productivity traits like growth, meat yield, and feed efficiency improve, equal attention is given to characteristics such as strong leg health, cardiovascular fitness, reproductive fitness, and overall robustness. This approach helps produce chickens that are efficient, healthy, resilient, and well-suited to a variety of environments and production systems.

Like all food production, chicken production uses natural resources, but is more environmentally efficient than many other sources of animal protein. Modern broiler production focuses on feed efficiency, responsible resource use, good nutrition, and sound management practices to produce high-quality, affordable protein while minimizing the environmental impact.

In fact, advances in broiler breeding show that the carbon footprint of broilers has decreased by roughly 55% over the past 50 years (1972-2022).

Faster-growing chickens are generally more resource-efficient because they reach market weight sooner, using less feed, water, and energy per bird. Slower-growing chickens take longer to reach market weight, which requires more resources over time.

Over the past decades, significant progress in poultry breeding has helped improve both productivity and sustainability across the broiler industry. Through balanced, data-driven selection and natural breeding, we have delivered birds that are more efficient at converting feed into high-quality protein, while also supporting strong health, welfare, and overall robustness. These improvements help reduce resource use per kilogram of chicken meat produced, contributing to a more sustainable food production and greater affordability for consumers worldwide.

To learn more about how these advancements have been achieved, watch this animation.

Welfare depends on many factors, including genetics, housing, nutrition, and management, not just growth rate. Slow-growing broilers take longer to reach market weight, while faster-growing broilers reach market weight sooner and are typically more feed-efficient. Both types are bred to stay healthy and perform well, and with proper care and management, can achieve good welfare outcomes.

Bird management factors have a very large impact on bird welfare. (Link to EFSA Opinion).

No. Modern poultry breeding takes a balanced approach, selecting for a wide range of traits including growth, yield, health, welfare, reproduction, and adaptability to different production systems. The goal is to produce birds that are efficient, resilient, and suited to various market conditions, rather than optimizing for any single trait alone.

No. The Ross 308 is the welfare leader for faster-growing chickens, as it is selected with a high focus on welfare. The Ross 308 has much better health and welfare compared to any other fast-growing chicken, especially in terms of good leg health and high liveability. Learn more about how we measure and advance welfare in our Decades of Welfare Report.

Growth rate is part of our breeding goal as it is an important production parameter. In the 1960s, it was a significant element; however, over time, the selection balance has changed to include a much wider range of traits. As part of our balanced breeding approach, selection for growth is done while welfare outcomes are also improved at the same time.

These terms are misleading and are sometimes used to criticize fast-growing chickens. In reality, faster-growing chickens are the result of decades of careful, data-driven selection and natural breeding processes focused on efficiency, health, welfare, and performance, not through unnatural methods.

Sustainability, together with welfare and efficiency, are all goals of our balanced breeding approach.

The Ross 308 is a leader in sustainability as it has an excellent Feed Conversion Rate (FCR), i.e., the rate at which the bird converts feed to live weight. The FCR improvement of the Ross 308 is 1 – 2 points, which leads to a 1% reduction in CO2.