“How old do you think these chickens are?” Levy Phiri asked the crowd, after scooping four multicolored birds out of a crate and setting them down in the courtyard outside the primary school in Kambvumbe, a village in Zambia’s rural Eastern Province.

The roughly 200 people who came out in the midafternoon heat for this presentation held by the country’s largest chicken hatchery and processor craned their necks for a better look.

A year, someone called out. Fourteen months, another suggested.