Breeding Native Chickens: How Many Inahin per Tandang, and What Actually Hatches

Five inahin to one tandang is the ratio the Philippine breeding programmes run on, and the one Philippine trial that ever tested it went to eight hens and found everything held. Dela Cruz (2015) at UPLB compared 1:5 against 1:8 on 45 pedigreed Boholano breeders and reported no significant differences (P>0.05) in egg weight, fertility, hatchability, embryonic mortality or day-old chick weight (UPLB institutional repository).

The harder half of a breeding plan sits one step past the ratio. One DOST-PCAARRD-funded institution has run that textbook setup with a real incubator and counted what came out of two stock groups: 47.83% and 41.01% of the eggs it set, month by month for eight months (Tadeo 2024). Ang numerong nasa lahat ng guide ay 70 hanggang 77.

Ilang inahin kada tandang?

Both Philippine programmes that publish a working ratio run five hens to one cock. The Boholano work at the Ubay Stock Farm in Bohol built twelve breeding families at 5:1, and the Darag model farm at Dumarao, Capiz prints the same ratio in its own management table. That number has sat in every Tagalog primer for years without a Philippine trial behind it. There is one, and it is a 2015 undergraduate thesis.

Dela Cruz put 45 birds through it at UPLB under Agapita J. Salces: 39 hens and 6 roosters, all 30 months old, semi-intensive housing, completely randomised design, three replicates per treatment. The counts reconcile: three pens of eight inahin and three of five is 39, tig-isa ang tandang sa bawat pen. The conclusion names the money. Raising the ratio from 1:5 to 1:8 is possible “without adversely affecting the reproductive performance” and “will increase the income of raisers by decreasing the production cost of having excess male on the flock” (UPLB record).

Read it inside what it is. One flock, one season, n = 45, only the abstract online, and the Institute of Animal Science’s own listing for it returns an HTTP 403. The birds were 30 months old, the age at which a cock’s fertility is most in question, so the finding belongs to mature breeders. A trial that finds no difference is also weaker evidence than one that finds a difference: at three replicates, a real gap of a few points would have stayed invisible.

Meanwhile, ang totoong bakuran ay lumalayo sa 1:5 mula sa kabilang direksiyon. Dusaran and Pabulayan surveyed native chicken growers across six Western Visayas provinces and found “an average of 16.2 heads of hens and 4.4 heads of roosters for breeding or an average of 1 rooster to 4 hens” (PIDS-hosted report, 2015). Divide the two means and it is 3.68 hens per cock. In Palawan, Lopez et al. (2014) measured 108 raisers at a ratio the paper prints as 1:2.11, which is fewer hens per tandang again.

The survey has two limits worth carrying. It went through the Provincial Veterinarian and the Municipal Agriculture Officer to growers keeping at least 20 head, with a mean of 17.5 years of experience, so these are settled bakuran. And it prints no sample size and reproduces none of its tables, telling the reader that “Tables can be requested from the authors or from CPU”. Percentages with the denominator left off, in other words. The year is unsettled too: PIDS files it as 2015, a Central Philippine University copy as Patubas June 2014.

The gastos shows up in what those same growers want. Asked about expansion, 69.2% would go to not more than 20 hens and 82.9% to not more than 10 roosters, so the tandang carries the tighter ceiling. Isang tandang na sobra ay kumakain ng feeds sa buong buwan para sa fertility na nakuha na ng kasama niya. Sayang ang sako. Ibenta mo siya o katayin bago dumating ang susunod, at kung ibebenta, what a liveweight bird turns into dressed decides what you are actually holding.

How many of those eggs become sisiw?

Tadeo measured it for eight months and published the table month by month, at the Abra State Institute of Sciences and Technology demo site in Lagangilang. The setup line is the textbook one: “Each pen contained 5 hens and 1 rooster in a ratio of 5:1”, at 48 head per group on the abstract’s count, which the methods section then contradicts with 48 hens and 8 roosters. Breeder feed at 100 to 150 g a day, eggs collected every afternoon, held seven days only, one dummy egg left in the pugad, and set at weekly intervals from August 2022 to March 2023 (Diversitas Journal 9(1 Special):0480-0494). The funding note names DOST-PCAARRD.

The means over those eight months were 47.83% for the Abra-origin group and 41.01% for the Bolinao-origin group, and Tadeo states the basis plainly: total eggs set. January was the worst month for both, at 34.97% and 32.04%. Against that, PAB-IS publishes fertility separately for each of its four documented lines and then gives hatchability as one overall band of 70 to 77% covering all of them.

That is 22.17 percentage points between the reference floor and the better measured mean, or 47.83 as 68.33% of 70. Bolinao is one of the eight lines the national standard names and one PAB-IS does not document, so the 47.83% stays with Bolinao. What travels is the size of the shortfall: mga isang katlo ang kulang sa sisiw kumpara sa plano na nakasandal sa 70 percent. PCARRD’s own Farm Primer No. 28 (2008), on producing day-old and hardened chicks, would settle a good deal of this, and the one upload of it that surfaces is a Scribd listing with no pages behind it.

The second measured figure comes from UPLB on a different fraction. Dela Cruz and colleagues set 72 fertile eggs from 52-week-old Banabang Kalabaw breeders in two incubators, at 36.5 °C and 37.5 °C, and got 56.00% and 64.50% hatch of fertile (PJVAS 46(1):69-75). Hatch of fertile removes the infertile eggs from the bottom of the fraction, so it should sit above a figure computed on eggs set. It does, and it is still below the published band. Flag one oddity in that row: an 8.5-point gap with standard deviations of 2.83 and 3.54 and a P-value of 0.92 does not sit together, and the paper prints it that way.

Highest at the top, lowest at the bottom. The two lowest rows are institutions running incubators and counting; the two highest are a reference band and a survey of what raisers recalled. Read the Figure column without the Basis column beside it and you are comparing fractions with different denominators.

A rate fills no brooder on its own, so turn it into a tray count: divide the chicks you need by the fraction you get. Twenty chicks at 47.83% is 41.81 eggs set, and at 41.01% it is 48.77. Set 42 to 49 eggs for 20 chicks. The same twenty on the 70 percent floor is 28.57, call it 29, and that gap of 13 to 20 eggs is where a short batch comes from. Dagdagan mo ang ilalagay sa tray, hindi ang inaasahan mo sa labas. If those twenty are pullets standing in the bakuran, a second loss lands after the hatch. The Palawan survey counted 5.68 chicks weaned out of a clutch of 10.44 eggs, and that 54 percent spans the hatch and the weaning together, so it is not a post-hatch survival rate to stack on top of one. On the same clutches 66.89 percent of the chicks that hatched were still alive at weaning, which turns twenty hatched into about thirteen. That whole chain is a broody hen’s and not an incubator’s, so a keeper with no incubator works from it and leaves the 41 to 48 percent above alone.

Which manok do you actually keep?

The selection half has a short Philippine answer: the flock record beats the manok standing in front of you, because in the one Philippine genetic study of native chicken the heritability of body weight at harvest age sits near the bottom of its own table. Which line to start from is a separate question, and what is published about the four documented lines carries it, nucleus flocks included.

One trait sits outside all of that, and you can select on it directly at the tray, bago pa mabuksan ang incubator. Dela Cruz et al. found the correlation between the weight of an egg and the weight of the chick that came out of it at r = 0.93 in the 36.5 °C incubator, 0.97 at 37.5 °C and 0.95 combined, all at P<0.01, and put the practical form in their own abstract: “egg weight can be used as direct selection criteria for chick weight” (PJVAS 46(1):69-75). Their eggs averaged 48.76 g, pullet size under the Philippine National Standard for table eggs, and the chick out of a 45.39 g hatching egg weighed 31.59 g, or 69.6% of it.

Kaya kapag pumipili ka ng itlog na ipapapisa, ang mas mabigat na itlog ang mas mabigat na sisiw, at nasukat na iyan dito mismo. Two things hold it short of a breeding strategy. It is a phenotypic correlation inside one hatch, so it describes the itlog in your hand, one pisa at a time. And the Boholano genetics work reports genetic correlations running the other way across families, egg weight against fertility at -0.56 and day-75 body weight against egg weight at -0.70. Both can be true at once: the big egg reliably gives you the big chick this week, and steering a whole line toward big eggs charges you somewhere else. Kung ilang itlog ang inaasahan mo sa isang inahin sa isang taon, nasa ibang pahina iyon.

What does a breeder bird cost?

On 23 April 2026 the Agricultural Training Institute’s Regional Training Center VI, at the ASU Compound in Banga, Aklan, issued a request for quotation for 60 breeder hens and 60 breeder roosters, “Age - four (4) to six (6) months old”, with an approved budget for the contract of ₱60,000.00 (DA-ATI RTC VI, PR 2025-03-236c). The purpose line reads post-training support for a Coconut-Native Chicken Integration training held 21 to 23 April 2026, delivered to New Washington, Aklan.

Divide the budget by the head count and it is ₱500 a bird. That figure needs two labels and it needs both. It is a ceiling, because an approved budget for the contract is the most the office may pay and a supplier bids under it. And it is this page’s division, because the quotation’s own unit cost and total cost columns sit blank for the supplier to fill in.

The lot is a flat 1:1, 60 hens to 60 roosters, a third ratio standing beside the 1:5 the programmes run and the 1:8 UPLB tested, and the document leaves unstated how it splits among beneficiaries. Read the paperwork loosely: its warranty clause promises to replace “all breeder hens and roasters” and refers to “any Stock Weaner found unhealthy”, boilerplate carried over from a swine quotation.

So the market price of a native breeder is a hole with a government ceiling sitting at the edge of it. The archive’s nearest record is gap G-16, the missing day-old chick price, and a four-to-six-month breeder sits beside that gap instead of inside it: the broiler DOC series settles the farmgate half of the chick question, and a procurement ceiling in Aklan is what one office was prepared to pay for one training. The one commercial hatchery page selling native day-old chicks online quotes live stock on enquiry and prints a single price, ₱800 for an e-book.

Hold the farm gate beside it. Native chicken read ₱223.95 per kilo liveweight in June 2026, which prices the same bird by the scale, so weigh a breeder you decide against keeping before you price her as breeding stock. Presyo ng gobyerno ang ₱500, at hindi presyo sa palengke.

What usually goes wrong

1. The mistake: Planning a replacement batch on 70 to 77 percent hatchability.

   Do this instead: Plan on 41 to 48 percent and treat anything above it as a good month.

   The 70 to 77 percent band is DOST-PCAARRD’s reference figure for all four documented lines together. ASIST Abra ran the textbook setup on two stock groups, counted against total eggs set, and got 47.83 and 41.01 percent over eight months, with the worst month of the eight falling to 32.04 percent.

2. The mistake: Comparing your own tray against a figure without asking what it divides by.

   Do this instead: Ask whether the percentage is chicks out of eggs set or chicks out of fertile eggs.

   Tadeo (2024) states hers is on total eggs set. Dela Cruz et al. (2020) report hatch of fertile, which drops the infertile eggs out of the denominator and lifts the percentage on the same tray. PAB-IS does not say which basis its band uses.

3. The mistake: Applying the 47.83 percent to a Darag or Boholano egg count to get chicks per year.

   Do this instead: Carry the size of the shortfall across, and leave the percentage with the line it was measured on.

   Tadeo measured true-to-type Bolinao, which is not one of PAB-IS’s four documented lines. Multiplying one line’s hatchability by another line’s egg count produces a fabricated figure wearing a real citation.

4. The mistake: Reading Dela Cruz (2015) as proof that 1:8 is settled for Philippine native chickens.

   Do this instead: Read it as one trial on 45 mature birds that failed to find a difference.

   It is an undergraduate thesis with only its abstract online, one flock, one season, three replicates, and breeders aged 30 months. A trial that finds nothing is weaker evidence than one that finds something, and a few points of real difference would not have shown up at that size.

5. The mistake: Quoting ₱500 a head as the price of a native breeder.

   Do this instead: Say it is a government procurement ceiling for a 120-head training lot in Aklan in April 2026, divided by the head count.

   The approved budget for the contract is the most the office may pay and the awarded price can only be lower. The quotation’s unit cost column is blank, so no unit price was printed at all. Gap G-16 is registered partial for the day-old chick price, and a four-to-six-month breeder sits beside it rather than inside it.

Keeping the flock from closing in on itself

A bakuran flock that hatches its own replacements is breeding a rooster to his own daughters inside two years, and every Philippine paper that mentions it recommends record keeping. Lopez et al. found their Palawan raisers kept none.

Molecular work on this exists and is more recent than most keepers realise. Santiago et al. (2022) genotyped 230 birds across six Philippine native chicken genetic groups using 15 FAO-recommended microsatellite markers and published inbreeding coefficients per group in Proceedings of ICETECH 2021 (Atlantis Press). The landing page carries the abstract, the per-group values sit in the full text, and the mirror that surfaces is a page-image scan. Read the scope carefully in any case: those are sampled nucleus populations at institutions, and a marker-based coefficient on a research population answers a different question from what is happening sa bakuran mo.

For a backyard flock what exists is the arithmetic, in FAO’s guidance on in vivo conservation, Box 7 on printed page 36, which gives Wright’s effective population size as (4 × NM × NF)/(NM + NF) and the rate of inbreeding per generation as 1/(2 × Ne). The same document puts a rate between 0.5 and 1 percent per generation at its vulnerable boundary.

Run one breeding group of one tandang and five inahin through that and Ne is 3.33, giving a rate of inbreeding of 15% a generation. That division is this page’s, on FAO’s formula, and no effective population size or rate of inbreeding has been published for any Philippine backyard flock. What the formula does say is where to spend: Ne rises with the number of breeding males, so bringing in one unrelated tandang before the flock has bred on itself for a few generations buys more than any hen you could add, and it is why the research programmes run twelve breeding families instead of one. The formula also assumes a closed population, while a bakuran is the openest flock there is: pumapasok ang tandang ng kapitbahay at sumisira sa arithmetic pabor sa iyo. Ang hindi mo makontrol ang siya ring nagpoprotekta.

What would change this answer?

Two published figures would change the answer, and both are within reach of institutions that already hold the data.

The first is hatchability split by line. PAB-IS already publishes fertility separately for Darag, ZamPen, Camarines and Boholano, then collapses hatchability into one band across all four (PAB-IS). Splitting the second the way it already splits the first would tell a keeper whether the Bolinao result is a line effect, a management effect or a season effect.

The second is a flock-level inbreeding figure taken in somebody’s bakuran, where the kapitbahay’s tandang is part of the population. DOST-PCAARRD ran a three-day training on breeding and selection strategies for Boholano native chicken at Tagbilaran in October 2025, and its write-up lists the topics: hatchery operations, farm recording, economic viability of breeder stocks, selection and breeding (DOST-PCAARRD QID, 16 October 2025). The numbers behind those five topics are being taught in rooms, and publishing the handouts would close more of this page than a new study would.

Until then the useful figure is the one you make yourself. The native chicken price page asks a keeper to log something different and it is worth reading for the habit. The pillar covers the flock those chicks are joining, and a native batch against a broiler one puts those replacements against the alternative.

Set the eggs, isulat mo kung ilan ang pumasok at ilan ang napisa, at ilagay mo ang buwan sa tabi. Three or four settings and the fraction in your notebook is a hatchability figure with your own storage days and your own Enero inside it, measured on your own manok. Iyon na ang numerong pagbabatayan mo ng susunod na pisa.

Questions people actually ask

How many hens per rooster for native chickens in the Philippines?

Five hens to one rooster is what the Philippine institutional breeding programmes run, and the only Philippine trial to test the ratio found room above it. Dela Cruz (2015) at UPLB compared 1:5 against 1:8 on 45 pedigreed Boholano breeders, three replicates per treatment, and reported no significant differences (P>0.05) in egg weight, fertility, hatchability, embryonic mortality or day-old chick weight. Two Philippine surveys of what backyard keepers actually run come out lower than either: 1 rooster to 4 hens in Western Visayas (Dusaran and Pabulayan, 2015) and 1:2.11 in Palawan (Lopez et al., 2014). The common backyard error is keeping too many roosters, not too few.

What percentage of native chicken eggs actually hatch? Show the answer

The one Philippine institution that measured it against total eggs set got 47.83 percent and 41.01 percent, on two stock groups run side by side for eight months at Abra State Institute of Sciences and Technology (Tadeo, 2024, DOST-PCAARRD funded). DOST-PCAARRD's own breed information system publishes 70 to 77 percent as a reference band for all four documented lines. At UPLB, Dela Cruz and colleagues (2020) got 56.0 and 64.5 percent hatch of fertile on Banabang Kalabaw, which is a narrower denominator and still under the reference band. Plan a replacement batch on the measured figures and treat 70 to 77 percent as a reference.

What is the difference between hatchability and hatch of fertile? Show the answer

The denominator. Hatchability is usually chicks out of every egg set, including the eggs that were never fertile in the first place. Hatch of fertile is chicks out of the fertile eggs only, so the infertile ones are removed from the bottom of the fraction and the percentage comes out higher on the same tray. Tadeo (2024) states her figure is based on total eggs set. Dela Cruz et al. (2020) report hatch of fertile. DOST-PCAARRD's published 70 to 77 percent band does not say which it means, so a keeper comparing it to their own tray is comparing two fractions that may not share a denominator.

How much does a native chicken breeder cost in the Philippines? Show the answer

No agency publishes a market price for native breeder stock. The closest published Philippine figure is a procurement ceiling: the DA Agricultural Training Institute's Regional Training Center VI issued a request for quotation on 23 April 2026 with an approved budget of ₱60,000 for 120 head of four-to-six-month-old breeder hens and roosters, which divides to ₱500 a head. That is an upper limit a supplier bids under, not a transaction, and the quotation's own unit cost column is blank. The archive's nearest record is gap G-16, which covers the day-old chick price, and a four-to-six-month breeder sits beside that gap instead of inside it.

How do you avoid inbreeding in a backyard chicken flock? Show the answer

Bring in an unrelated rooster before the flock has bred on itself for several generations, and keep a written record of which hens hatched which chicks. FAO's guidance on in vivo conservation gives the arithmetic behind that advice: effective population size rises with the number of breeding males, so a flock with one rooster loses genetic variation fastest whatever the hen count. FAO puts a rate of inbreeding between 0.5 and 1 percent per generation at its vulnerable boundary. No effective population size and no pedigree inbreeding rate has been published for any Philippine backyard flock, so the figures a keeper can act on are their own records.