From Red Junglefowl to Modern Broiler: The Long Journey of the Farm Chicken

In July 2026 the Bangladeshi news site Jagonews24 ran a feature on the history of the "farm chicken", the broiler that dominates the country's markets. Its point was that the broiler is no artificial creature but a wild forest bird reshaped by millennia of domestication and decades of selective breeding.

Scientists regard the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) as the main ancestor of the domestic chicken. Its native range stretches from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh to southern China, Thailand and Indonesia. A 2020 genome study concluded that all domestic chickens came from one subspecies, G. g. spadiceus, found from northeast India to southern China and the Malay Peninsula.

Researchers disagree on the date. The 2020 study put domestication at around 9,500 years ago. A 2022 international study led by Joris Peters of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich found that the earliest securely identified chicken bones come from Ban Non Wat, a dry rice farming site in central Thailand dated roughly to 1650 to 1250 BC. The team argued that rice and millet fields drew wild junglefowl close to people.

Early chickens were not mainly food. The same research notes that whole or partial skeletons of adult birds were placed in human graves in Southeast Asia. Jagonews24 noted that chickens were also kept for rituals and cockfighting before people began breeding birds that laid more eggs and grew faster.

Ocean View, in Sussex County, Delaware, is regarded as the birthplace of the commercial broiler industry. In 1923 Cecile Long Steele, a farmer there, ordered 50 chicks to replenish her flock and was mistakenly sent 500. According to the Delaware Public Archives historical marker, at 16 weeks the birds weighed 2¼ pounds and sold for 62 cents a pound.

Wikipedia records that she sold the 387 birds that survived and doubled production to 1,000 chickens in 1924. One of the family's chicken houses, the First Broiler House, is listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.

Organised breeding followed. Between 1946 and 1948 the grocery chain A&P, in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, ran the "Chicken of Tomorrow" contest, with the national final held in 1948 at the University of Delaware Agricultural Experiment Station. White Rocks from Henry Saglio's Arbor Acres farm won the purebred category, and Red Cornish crosses from the Vantress Hatchery won overall.

According to Wikipedia, most commercial broilers reach slaughter weight at four to six weeks of age, while slower-growing breeds take about 14 weeks. By 1989, the Delaware marker notes, growers produced birds of twice the weight in half the time.

Many people believe farm chickens are given hormones, but a Mississippi State University Extension publication explains that hormone use in poultry production was banned in the United States in the 1950s. Growth hormones are proteins, it says, so they are broken down in the stomach when fed. The publication credits three factors for the broiler's growth:

• genetic selection by primary breeding companies over many generations
• nutrition matched to each genetic strain
• environmental management: temperature, ventilation, lighting and feeder space

Jagonews24 described how chicken keeping in Bangladesh was once a small backyard activity of rural households, with slow-growing native birds and low output. After the 1990s the number of small and medium farms rose quickly and the broiler became part of everyday diets.

A 2017 review by Hamid and colleagues in the Asian Journal of Poultry Science puts figures on that change. The poultry population grew by 0.7 percent a year in 1970 to 1980 and by 4 percent a year in 1990 to 2005. From 1995 until 2007 commercial poultry grew by an average of 15 to 20 percent a year, slowing after outbreaks of avian influenza. Total investment in the sector was BDT 15 thousand million in the 1990s and more than BDT 150 thousand million at the time of the review, and the authors estimated that the sector created direct and indirect work for about 6 million people.

Photo: Lip Kee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, Science News, Delaware Public Archives, Mississippi State University Extension, Asian Journal of Poultry Science, Wikipedia