Broiler FCR in the Philippines: What a Backyard Batch Can Actually Measure

Anong FCR ang nakuha mo sa huling batch? Ask that in a bakuran and you get a number. Ask it off a breed table and you get a different number, and neither person is wrong, kasi magkaibang sum ang ginawa nila.

Yours is the one you can actually do. Bilangin mo ang sako na napunta sa mga manok, bilangin mo ang kilo ng liveweight na naibenta mo, at hatiin. Nothing else is measurable at the scale a backyard keeper works at, at walang kailangang timbangan na wala ka pa.

The published one is a laboratory quantity dressed as a farm quantity. It counts feed eaten by birds that were alive to eat it, over the weight of those same surviving birds, at ang mga namatay ay nawawala sa magkabilang panig ng fraction. Nasa footnote iyon (Aviagen 2022), hindi sa maliit na letra ng brochure.

Those are not two estimates of one thing. They are two different quantities, the second is always the smaller, and every guide that tells you a Philippine broiler “should hit 1.5” is quoting the second at a reader who can only compute the first. If you are still working out whether to place a batch at all, the broiler pillar covers the ground before this one.

What the published column actually divides

Aviagen prints three things per day for an as-hatched Ross 308 AP: body weight, cumulative feed intake, and the cumulative FCR that is the second divided by the first. At day 35 that is 3,268 g of feed over 2,360 g of bird, which recomputes to 1.385 against the 1.386 the table prints, the difference being its own rounding (Ross 308 AP Broiler: Performance Objectives, 2022). The column is not a separate measurement. It is division.

Three footnotes decide what the division means. Body weight is on-farm body weight, so feed is present in the gut. Feed intake is per living bird. And the FCR column includes the chick’s weight at placement and does not account for mortality (Aviagen 2022). Cobb-Vantress carries the same mortality footnote on the Cobb500 supplement.

One of those three works in your favour and it is the one nobody mentions. Because the placement weight is inside the published figure, ang timbang ng sisiw sa unang araw ay nabibilang na sa parehong panig. Ganoon din ang sum mo kahit hindi mo iniisip: may timbang na ang sisiw pagdating, at nasa kilo na naibenta mo ang timbang na iyon. That part matches. It is the only part that does.

The mortality footnote is the one that does not. A bird that dies on day 30 ate for twenty-nine days, and none of that feed appears anywhere in the column. It was subtracted from the numerator the moment the bird stopped being a living bird. The week-by-week table prints the same rows day by day, and every one of them is counted this way.

Your own number counts every gram that left the dealer

Sacks bought over kilos sold is a blunter instrument and a more honest one, kasi wala kang mababawas kahit gustuhin mo.

Five things ride inside it that ride inside no published column. The feed eaten by the birds that died. Ang natapon sa lupa mula sa feeder na sobra ang laman. Feed that caked and went off in a humid store between the day you bought the sack and the day you finished it. Whatever the daga and the wild birds took. And the part-sack still standing in the corner at harvest, kung binilang mo ang binili at hindi ang naubos.

That last one is a counting error rather than a real loss, and it is the easiest of the five to fix: weigh what is left in the store on harvest day and take it off the total, or carry it into the next batch and say that you did. The other four are real, and not one of them has a published Philippine figure attached. There is no national estimate of feed wastage in a backyard coop, no measurement of storage spoilage in this climate, walang kahit ano (the gaps register carries the whole list). The archive logs the whole absence around backyard performance as gap G-1.

So your number is bigger than the table for two entirely separate reasons that get blamed on one. The first is biology: an open-sided kulungan is hotter, the birds eat and grow differently, and that part is real underperformance. The mechanism has a source even where the measurement is not a Philippine one: cyclic heat stress cuts feed intake by about 15%, roughly 1.5% for every degree, with no temperature range attached to that figure (Teyssier et al. 2022). The second is arithmetic, and it is not underperformance at all. It is the same batch counted with more things in it.

Almost every article that tells a Philippine keeper his conversion is poor has quietly merged the two.

A bird that dies on day 28 has eaten most of a harvest bird’s feed

Take the arithmetic half on its own and run it through a batch, on Aviagen figures throughout so that nothing but the accounting can move.

Fifty chicks placed, three lost, 47 sold at day 35, which is the 94% livability the open-sided growers in Datuin et al. (2022) named as their big-bird target. The survivors eat 153.6 kg. They sell as 110.9 kg of liveweight. The breed table’s method stops there and prints 1.386.

Your sacks tell a different story depending on nothing but the calendar. Three losses in week one and the feed bill is 154.1 kg, for a computed 1.39. Move the same three deaths to day 21 and it is 157.1 kg and 1.42. Move them to day 28 and it is 159.8 kg and 1.44. Same 50 chicks, same 47 sold, same kilos on the hook, three different numbers, at hindi nagbago ang manok kahit kaunti.

Wala sa agwat na iyan ang galing ng pag-aalaga. Kung kailan namatay ang mga manok iyan, and the published column cannot see any of it. Sixty grams of difference per kilo sold, out of a figure whose useful range runs from about 1.4 to about 2.0, is a meaningful slice of the whole scale before heat, feed quality or spillage has been allowed to touch it.

The reason sits in one column of the same breed table, and it is worth reading down. A bird sold at day 35 has eaten 3,268 g. A bird that dies before then has eaten some fraction of that, at mabilis umakyat ang fraction na iyon.

Cumulative intake, as-hatched Ross 308 AP, transcribed from Aviagen (2022). Controlled-housing objectives, used here to size an accounting gap and not as a Philippine measurement.

Kaya magkaibang-magkaiba ang timing ng patay. A sisiw lost in week one takes 5% of a ration with it. Ang mamamatay sa ikalimang linggo ay dala na ang halos dalawang katlo, and it contributes exactly nothing to the kilos you sell.

Cobb500 runs the same accounting on different numbers, 3,635 g of feed into a 2,521 g bird by day 35, on a cumulative column carrying the identical mortality footnote (Cobb-Vantress 2022). The two strains are never averaged here, so read the table for the one you actually placed.

The peso side of the same deaths sits elsewhere. Fifty day-old chicks are ₱1,675 at the ₱33.50 per head BAI monitored figure for the week of 13 July 2026, which is integrator and wholesale farmgate rather than dealer counter. The 50-bird costing works the rest of that batch through line by line.

A backyard batch that computes 1.9 has not lost to a farm that reports 1.83

This is where almost every Philippine broiler guide goes wrong, and it goes wrong in the reader’s favour of feeling bad rather than in his favour of feeling good.

The comparison runs like this. You finish a batch, you count sacks, you count kilos, you get 1.9. You then read that Philippine open-sided growers run 1.50 to 1.83, and you conclude that your bakuran is worse than a commercial farm. Sayang, akala mo maayos ang batch.

Hindi ganoon ang lumalabas doon. The 1.83 is a target a commercial grower named for himself, and a commercial grower computing a target FCR is working to whatever convention his integrator uses. Whether the birds that died are inside that number is not something a reader of the published band can tell, and the paper prints it as a bare ratio. Your 1.9 is a specific, known convention: everything you bought, over everything you sold. Ang isa ay ibinigay na numero, ang isa ay sinukat mo.

Two numbers computed by different methods do not become comparable because they are printed to the same number of decimal places. Put a 1.9 measured the hard way next to a 1.83 targeted the easy way and the gap you are looking at is partly the method, partly the housing, partly the year, and there is no published Philippine work that tells you the split. The direction is known. The size is not.

Nasa gastos ito at hindi sa pagmamalaki. A keeper who reads his own 1.9 as failure changes something: he buys a different brand, changes the ration, sinisisi ang sisiw, minsan mas kaunting manok sa susunod na batch. A bird at the 1.7 kg Philippine target liveweight carries ₱255.53 at the June 2026 PSA household farmgate of ₱150.31 per kilo liveweight, so a decision made off a bad comparison across 50 manok is not a small decision. Which farmgate series describes you matters as much: the same month’s commercial establishment reading was ₱118.69 per kilo liveweight, a different survey of different sellers, which the two farmgate prices separates properly. And the same feed bill is the largest line in the batch: at the top of the Philippine band, feed runs 45.6% above what the Ross day-28 row spends, which the feeds pillar and the feed cost piece both work out at your own sack price.

So the position, plainly. Do not score your batch against a published band. Score it against your own last batch, computed the same way, and quote the method whenever you quote the number.

The Philippine band is sixteen farms’ target and the scope travels with it

The 1.50 to 1.83 that circulates as “the Philippine FCR” needs its whole label every time, and it rarely gets it.

Datuin et al. (2022) surveyed 55 commercial broiler operations, 48 contract growers and 7 integrators, in the Philippine Journal of Veterinary and Animal Sciences 48(1):57-69. Table 5 on page 66 is headed “Broiler production performance targets of growers based on type of housing”, so it splits the 48 growers and not the 55 respondents. Sixteen of those growers are open-sided, and their column reads 1.50 to 1.83 for a big bird over 1.7 kg and 1.50 to 2.00 for lechon manok at 1.6 kg and under. The climate-controlled column reads 1.48 to 1.70 and 1.37 to 1.70 (PJVAS 48(1):57-69).

Four labels, then, on one band. Sixteen farms. Open-sided commercial contract growing with technical support behind it, hindi bakuran. A target the farm named for itself, not a result anybody recorded. And 33% of those growers told the same survey they meet their targets only sometimes or not at all, which is Table 6 on the same page.

The paper publishes ranges and no mean, so 1.665 is a figure the source does not contain. Kunin mo ang dalawang dulo at huwag kang gagawa ng gitna.

Not one backyard keeper is in that sample. That is gap G-1, and it is the reason this article cannot end by telling you what a bakuran hits.

Quote the method with the number

The fix is small and it is a habit rather than a technique. Whenever an FCR appears on a page or in a conversation, say which of the two sums produced it.

The right-hand column is the only one a keeper can produce and the left-hand column is the only one anybody publishes, which is the whole difficulty in one table.

Then write the two things that make your own number readable later: the mortality, and the day each bird was lost. Livability alone will not do it. Tatlong manok na namatay sa unang linggo at tatlong namatay sa ikalima ay pareho ang 94%, at magkaibang-magkaiba ang feed bill, as the batch above shows.

What usually goes wrong

1. The mistake: Scoring your own sacks-in over kilos-sold figure against the 1.50 to 1.83 Philippine band and concluding the batch underperformed.

   Do this instead: Score it against your own previous batch, computed the same way, and state the method beside any figure you quote at somebody else.

   The band is a target stated by 16 commercial farms and the convention behind it is not published. Your number counts dead birds and spillage; nothing says the target does. The comparison mixes housing, method and year with no way to separate them.

2. The mistake: Counting the sacks you bought rather than the feed the birds ate, with half a sack still standing in the store on harvest day.

   Do this instead: Weigh what is left and subtract it, or carry it into the next batch and write down that you did.

   Half a 50 kg sack on a 50-bird batch moves the answer by more than the difference between two of the mortality cases above. It is the one item on the list that is a counting error rather than a real loss.

3. The mistake: Dividing the feed by dressed kilos instead of liveweight.

   Do this instead: Use the liveweight you sold. If the buyer paid you on dressed weight, get the liveweight before the birds go.

   Every published FCR is a liveweight ratio, and no Philippine institution publishes a dressing percentage, so there is no honest conversion in either direction. A dressed divisor makes your batch look far worse than it was.

4. The mistake: Taking 1.665 as the Philippine figure because it sits in the middle of 1.50 to 1.83.

   Do this instead: Use both ends, and plan the feed order at 1.83.

   Datuin et al. publish ranges with no mean. A midpoint invented from a published range looks measured and is not, and a third of the growers in that survey miss the target end of it anyway.

The raw material has a published record even where the sack does not. BAI prices 15 feed ingredients weekly in pesos per kilo, and the week of 13 July 2026 read yellow corn at ₱24.75 and soybean meal at ₱29.38. Those explain why a sack price moves, and BAI has published no weekly report since that date, checked on 15 August 2026, so the ingredient series is as current as the record gets. They cannot be built into a sack price, which is gap G-15, and finished feed at ₱1,850 to ₱1,950 a sack depending on brand and area is a figure in circulation rather than a figure anybody publishes.

What would settle this is a study nobody has run

The claim this whole page rests on is checkable, and it has never been checked here. One paper would do it.

It would have to go into Philippine backyard flocks, the 20 and 50 bird kind in an open-sided kulungan on whatever feed the dealer had, and report three things per batch rather than one. Both conversion figures side by side: the sacks-in over kilos-sold number and the survivors-only number computed the way Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress compute theirs. The mortality rate. And the day the deaths landed.

Without the third, the first two cannot be reconciled. The batch above is proof of that on its own: 94% livability, three birds, one set of kilos sold, and the computed figure lands anywhere between 1.39 and 1.44 depending only on which week they went. A paper reporting livability alone would publish a gap it could not explain and a spread nobody could use.

Nothing in the Philippine literature carries any of the three. Datuin et al. surveyed 48 contract growers and 7 integrators, asked what they were aiming at, and reported one band per housing type with no method attached and no bakuran in the sample. The breed tables report the survivors-only figure for a house nobody here has. Between them is a question with two halves, and this country has published neither half, which is what G-1 in the gaps register records.

Until that paper exists, the honest statement is narrow and it is worth stating exactly. The two numbers differ. The sign of the difference is known, kasi ang bilang mo ay laging mas malaki. The size of it is not known, and any page that tells you a Philippine backyard FCR to two decimal places has invented the harder half of the answer.

Questions people actually ask

What is a good FCR for broilers in the Philippines?

The only published Philippine band is 1.50 to 1.83 for a big bird in open-sided housing, and it is a target rather than a result. Datuin et al. (2022) asked 55 commercial broiler farms what they were aiming at and split the 48 contract growers among them by housing type; 16 were open-sided. A third of those growers told the same survey they meet their targets only sometimes or not at all. It is also computed the way a commercial operation computes it, which is not the way a backyard keeper counts sacks and kilos, so it is not a figure a bakuran number can be scored against directly.

Why is my feed conversion worse than the published figure? Show the answer

Partly because an open-sided coop is hotter and hungrier than a controlled house, and partly because you are computing a different quantity. Aviagen states that its cumulative FCR column includes the chick weight at placement and does not account for mortality, and Cobb-Vantress carries the same footnote. The number you compute at the end of a batch is sacks bought over kilos sold, so it carries the feed eaten by every bird that died, plus anything spilled, spoiled or taken by rats. That figure is always the larger of the two.

How do I compute the FCR of my own batch? Show the answer

Weigh the feed that actually went into the birds, not the feed you bought: count every sack opened and subtract whatever is still standing in the store at harvest. Then divide by the kilos of liveweight you sold, not by the bird count. Write down the mortality and the day each bird was lost beside the answer, because without those two the number cannot be compared with anything published.

Does a breed table FCR include the birds that died? Show the answer

No. Aviagen states in the Ross 308 AP performance objectives that feed intake is per living bird and that the FCR column does not account for mortality, and the Cobb500 supplement carries the same footnote. Both columns do include the chick weight at placement, which is the one part of the sum that matches what a keeper computes.