History

Establishment of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Alberta (now known as the faculty of Agricultural, Life, and Environmental Sciences (ALES) as of 2008.

Department of Poultry Husbandry is formed in 1928.

The Department of Animal Science is formed from the Department of Animal Husbandry, Department of Poultry Husbandry, and Department of Veterinary Science in 1942.

Off-campus facilities were founded in 1947.

The Poultry Research Centre (PRC) is established in 1986. The University of Alberta, Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, and Alberta poultry producers (chicken, table egg, hatching egg, and turkey sectors) pooled their resources to deliver a coordinated poultry production research program for Alberta. Soon after, Maple Leaf Foods and Lilydale (two major poultry processors) lent their support to the PRC, which has quickly earned an esteemed reputation on the national and international stage for excellence in poultry production research and learning.

The "Rare Poultry Conservatory" originally involved six unselected breeds of chickens that helped evolve the poultry industry. Rare and random bred strains which are now house in the heritage flocks in the Poultry Research Centre were obtained in part from Agriculture Canada Research Station and partly from Dr. Crawford's experimental flocks (maintained unselected since 1965).

The PRC celebrated facility upgrades including:

• Alberta Chicken Producers Poultry Technology Centre (ACPPTC)houses the state of the art Henry Van Zeggelaar laboratory for poultry processing and packaging The ACPPTC, the Alberta Turkey Producers Computer Laboratory, and Lilydale Classroom.

• Alberta Hatching Egg Producers Hatchery (AHEPH), a state-of-the-art incubation and hatching facility.

• Alberta Egg Producers Environment Chambers (AEPEC) consisting of 8 chambers with extensive environmental monitoring and control capabilities.

PRC expanded to include value-added areas of meat and egg science. These included enhancing the value of poultry meat (e.g. dark meat, mechanically separated meat), by-products (e.g. spent hens, feathers, egg shells), and development of new high quality egg products (e.g. extraction of valuable components from eggs such as lysozyme; antibodies for pharmaceutical and antibiotic replacement purposes; and nutraceuticals).

The Alberta Livestock Industry Development Fund (ALIDF) and Alberta Agriculture Research Institute (AARI) invested over $5 million dollars to establish value-added poultry research capacity at the PRC. With the new funds, the PRC developed the value-added poultry meat program and high value egg program.

Three new industry partners joined the PRC, bringing the PRC scope from provincial to national and the total number of industry partners to nine.

• Sparks Eggs

• Burnbrae Farms

• Egg Farmers of Canada

Adopt a Heritage Chicken Program was started to promote the conservation of the unique genetic lines and to provide a way for the lines to become financially self-supporting.