INVESTMENT POTENTIAL OF SILKIE CHICKEN

by :  Sotera Pagatpat

             

      The rearing of chicken is popular in rural areas of most resource poor countries, as a means of providing supplementary food, extra income and also capitalize on harvest wastes and inferior grains produced on farms.
     Silkie chicken are one of the oldest rare breeds of poultry. Thier feathers is look like hair, they also have black skin, bones, five toes, mulberry colored walnut shaped comb. silkies are well known for thier calm, friendly temperament and are considered as an ideal pet because they have funny personalities and are friendly even with the children.

    Pet a silkie chicken and you understand how it gots its name.breeders also like them because they will hatch  other birds eggs. With a walnut-shaped crown of plumage, blue earlobes and feathers that come in a variety of colors, it's a striking-looking birds that's often raised for show.

     They are such goods moms," said FGrank R. Reese Jr., the fonder of Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Lindsborg, Kan., who breed silkie for show.

       The majority are sold for ornamental purposes, but there’s a big market in San Francisco, where there are Asians, and in Minneapolis, where there’s a Hmong market,” Mr. Wood said. Japanese, Cambodians and Koreans also eat the Silkie, he said.

At K. K. Live Poultry in Brooklyn’s main Chinatown, Danny Wu, the owner, said he sells, butchers and cleans 3,000 Silkies a week, up from 400 a week 10 years ago. He attributes the growth to the number of Chinese moving from China and Taiwan to New York City.

“They make it for soup, or for the broth for Mongolian hot pot,” he said, “and sometimes they make a curry.” For chefs outside Chinatown, though, it is not the easiest dish to sell.

       In China, the Silkie is called wu gu ji — black-boned chicken. It has been prized for its medicinal value since the seventh or eighth century, said Yu Ying-Shih, a retired professor of Chinese and East Asian studies at Princetown University. Women who have just given birth eat it for energy. But its curative powers are not necessarily gender-specific. When Professor Yu was a small boy growing up in Anhui, in southeastern China, he said, because he had constant headaches, he was given bowls of   silkie chicken soup to make the headache go away.

      Recent evidence also shows higher level of antioxidant called carnosine. antioxidant in general are great thing, black chicken has double the amount of carnosine than regular chicken. Besides this benefits,carnosines can help prevent arheroosclerosis, joint inflamation, protect against neurological disorder like alzhemiers and diabetic patient.
       Meat and eggs are preferred of most  chinese people because they believe that silkie chicken can alleviate certain ailments such as; fatigue, osteoporosis, iron deficient, anemia and hair loss can also protect against neurological disorders like alzhemiers and diabetes. eggs of silkie are said to have less cholesterol content