Today’s Agribusiness

Poultry farming is the raising of domesticated birds such as chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese, for the purpose of farming meat or eggs for food. Poultry is farmed in great numbers with chickens being the most numerous.

More than 500 million chickens are raised annually as a source of food, for both their meats and eggs. In Nigeria, poultry farm is divided into three categories; small scale, medium scale and large-scale farming.

The poultry industry is a broad niche. There are many sub-sectors in the poultry industry that you can tap into. When poultry farming is mentioned, a lot of people take that to mean chicken rearing or turkey rearing alone but poultry farming is a very wide business with different aspects.

Opportunities in the poultry industry

Day-old chicks, ducklings, pea chicks’ shops: This is the standard output from the hatchery for broiler, growers, egg producers, etc in the poultry industry. You can carve your niche in the poultry industry by hatching or supplying day-old chicks, duckling, peachicks and poults. It is a business of its own that can generate good income and return on investment is very high as the demands for day-old chicks are growing by the day. It’s a broad business that a lot of players are making money from.

Poultry drugs and vaccine shops: Poultry vaccines are widely applied to prevent and control contagious poultry diseases. Their use in poultry production is aimed at avoiding or minimizing the emergence of clinical disease at the farm level, thus increasing production. Vaccines and vaccination programmers vary broadly in regard to several local factors (e.g., type of production, the local pattern of disease, costs and potential losses), and are generally managed by the poultry industry. Vitamins and antibiotics are used in preventing poultry diseases as well.

Egg production (layer’s breeding): This is a business of keeping bird for egg production only for human consumption or for hatchery etc.

Poultry feed production and milling: It is a business opportunity that is not available only for high players in the industry such as Vita Feeds and Top Feeds but even small players can make good money formulating feeds for farmers especially now that concentrate feeds and raw materials for feed production are available in the open market for both farmers and feed millers.

Poultry equipment marketing and consultancy: Both locally fabricated poultry equipment and imported ones are good business to do, such as drinkers, battery cage, feeder, feed additives etc. As a consultant in the poultry industry, you will make good fortunes because you will handle both the day-old chicks supply, vaccination, feed or feed formulation for farmers. It’s not a must you will be an animal scientist before you become a consultant in the poultry industry training and retraining is the key and willingness to learn.

Egg and meat processing, packaging and marketing: You can market eggs and chicken meat to final consumers or industries that use it in productions. If you are known for it, there is a huge market for eggs today in Nigeria, both fast-food firms, confectionaries and so on will be coming as they know the products are always available.

Poultry manure supplies: There has been increased interest in using poultry litters as fertilizer since the price of fertilizer has skyrocketed. It is a beneficial addition to vegetable gardens and root crops, but raw manure can burn plants. Composting poultry manure with rice husk or sawdust turns it into what gardeners refer to as “black gold”–a nutrient-rich, hummus-like material suitable for use as a fertilizer or soil amendment. The advantage is that poultry litter can be applied at any time of the year, but, like all fertilizers, it is best to apply near the time of crop uptake. So, the demand is high and poultry farms sometimes look for ways to dispose of it at little or no cost to dealers.

You can start this business as low as N50, 000 depending on your location.

A guide on business and investment opportunities in the agricultural business value chain in Nigeria is available.

Agbaji can be contacted via email: <learnder@gmail.com>.

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