How to Start Your New Poultry Farming Business

Find your niche

Before you start your poultry business, you must, first of all, decide which sector under which you would like to operate. Options include opening a hatchery and then selling the chicks as day-old, buying day-old chicks to raise and sell them after six weeks, raising layers for eggs and production of chicken feed. Each sector has its unique advantages and disadvantages. For example, opening a hatchery means that immediately after the eggs hatch, you sell off the chicks as day-old meaning, you do not incur any additional feeding cost but to be successful in the hatchery space, you need your customers to trust that your chicks are of the utmost quality – for this reason, you may have some challenges competing with the already established companies since these companies have already taken years to build trust and customer loyalty.

Find a suitable location

Among the numerous factors which affect poultry production, the location of your farm is one of the most important to consider. You know, rearing domestic birds especially chicken, is almost like raising your very own children. You probably wouldn’t like to raise your children in a slum, would you? The same way, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like to raise your chickens in a noisy and polluted environment. Furthermore, consider whether your location is going to be residential or rural. I believe it will be a better option to locate your farm in a more rural area because chicken usually make a lot of noise and sometimes smell pretty bad – this could disturb your neighbours and you could end up being reported to the authorities.

Choose your farming system

If you want to make serious money from poultry farming, I suggest you consider the intensive farming system as that is more efficient, weather conditions could easily be controlled and protection of your birds from predators is almost guaranteed. Under the intensive system, you have two options to choose from; the battery cage system and the deep-litter system. If you want to venture into egg production, it is more advisable to opt for the battery cage system but if you want to produce broilers, you must choose the deep-litter system.

Register your business

Formalizing your business comes with many perks. When I ask some poultry farmers why they haven’t registered their business yet, they give me the usual, “oh I don’t want to pay taxes” kind of response. These poultry farmers are potentially missing out on numerous opportunities:

1. The ability to gain easy access to credit
2. The ability of owners to protect their personal assets in case the business goes bankrupt or is hit by a lawsuit. NB: this only applies to a limited liability company registration.
3. The ability to properly brand their businesses
4. The ability to gain access to well-respected institutions such as hotels and top restaurants.

Employ the highest quality staff

Let’s face it if you’ve gotten to this point you probably want to run a sizeable poultry farm which will make a lot of money for yourself and your family right? Well then listen up! You obviously can run your farm as a one-man show but if your goal is to grow very fast, then you must consider hiring the following professionals: a manager, bookkeeper/accountant, sales rep, marketing officer, driver and one or two labourers.

Market your products

After producing your broilers or eggs, the next step is to find people who are willing to buy your products. It is quite easy to sell eggs in Ghana but it is a little bit challenging to sell broilers. Before your start producing broilers, first, research your market and find out the particular seasons whereby broilers are in high demand. Usually, raising broilers provides a fast return on your investment. Broilers typically reach market weight in 6 weeks so if you can secure a contract with a hotel, restaurant or company, you could be receiving heavy checks every seven or eight weeks.