Chickenmen DPR/TV/1303

Soldiers of the 1st Australian Civil Affairs Unit are helping to foster a booming chicken raising industry in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam. Each week two Australian soldiers drive fourty five miles to Saigon to purchase day old chicks from Kim Soon Ai, a Japanese woman now settled in Vietnam, and her partner Lieutenant Canh. The chickens are then distributed in lots of fifty to farmers around the Province. The farmer, using the methods taught by the Australians, can fatten them in ten weeks for sale at local markets for about one hundred and fifty per cent profit. An initial gift of fifty chickens is made by the Civil Affairs Unit to approved Vietnamese farmers interested in the scheme. The second batch of chicks is purchased from the profits raised on the initial batch. And so the scheme grows. Shortly the Civil Affairs men hope to see a chicken hatchery established in the Province to save the long trips to Saigon and so provide Phuoc Tuy Province with a new industry. Also identified: Private John Murray, 21, of Nowra, NSW; Lieutenant Jim Holland of Hawthorn, Vic.