International Journal of Empirical Research Vol 1 No 1 Dec2011 111 Applying Linear Programming Technique to Formulate Least Cost Balanced Ration for White Eggs Layers in Jordan Moatasem Almasad, Ebraheem Altahat, Ali AL-Sharafat Department of Animal Production and Protection, Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, Faculty of Agriculture, Jerash University, Jerash, 26150, Jordan Abstract: This study aimed at using the linear programming technique to formulate least cost balanced ration for white eggs layers at the different stages of rearing and production periods using local feed ingredients. The rations formulated for Hisexbreed. The main goal of the study is to reduce the cost of white eggs production in Jordan. The feed ingredients used were: yellow corn, barley, soybean, wheat bran, concentrate, premix (vitamin/mineral complex), salt, lysine, limestone, Soya oil, methionine, and dicalcium phosphate. Constructed Linear Programming (LP) models were designed to reflect various feedstuff combinations used in the diet formulation, current market prices, nutrient composition and range of inclusion to obtain a least-cost ration for egg layers according to the available feedstuffs in Jordan. The objective of the models was to minimize cost of producing a particular diet after satisfying a set of constraints. The variables in the models were the ingredients while the cost of each ingredient and the nutrient value of each ingredient was the parameter. The results produced using LP technique revealed that the 0-6 weeks of age ration cost was the least compared to the other six ration combinations. It was 310.374 JDs. The 18 weeks to pre-layer ration was the highest in cost. It was 325.001 JDs. The other rations according to hens age were 312.923, 316.778, 323.129, 315.678, and 315.314 JDs for 6-12 weeks, 12-18 weeks, 80 grams/ day feed consumption, 100 grams/ day feed consumption, and 120 grams/ day feed consumption respectively. These costs are lower by nearly 25-45 JDs/ton than those imposed on the producers by the market. These results confirm the fact that linear programming is a very important technique to allocate the available feedstuffs in a least cost layer ration formulation. The variation in the cost is a result of the variation in the nutrient requirements of the laying hens according to the stage of production. Each stage requires certain level of combined nutrients in the used feedstuffs. This will cause different quantities of feedstuffs to be used in each ration. Key words: Ration, linear programming, feedstuffs, nutrient requirements, white eggs layer, least cost. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـ INTRODUCTION Egg production is the major concern in layer production, as it constitutes to the bulk of total revenues generated. Chung et al. (1983) and Farooqet al. (2001) reported that there is a significant and positive association of net profits with number of eggs produced in a layer production enterprise. Generally speaking, the major problem with poultry production can be streamlined to feeds in all its ramifications (David-West, 1989). Fetuga (1989) reported that feed costs represent between 70-80% of the total cost of producing various livestock products. Feed formulation is the process of quantifying the amounts of feed ingredients that need to be put together, to form a single uniform mixture (diet) for poultry that supplies all of their nutrient requirements. It is important that returns are maximized through use of adequate diets. Feed formulation is a central operation in poultry production, ensuring that feed ingredients are economically used for optimum growth of chickens. It requires a good knowledge of poultry and feed ingredients. Most large-scale poultry farmers depend on commercial feed mills for their feeds, to obviate the need to do their own formulations or feed preparation. It is therefore essential that