Why Ignoring Record-Keeping Could Spell Disaster for Your Farm

Sure, it can be pretty tiresome or sometimes outright boring to keep track of every single cedi entering and leaving your farm but failure to do so could lead to certain consequences.

Just recently, a farmer DM’d us on Instagram about how she was bleeding cash because her birds (32 weeks old) weren’t laying to her expectations coupled with her customers not willing to pay high prices for her eggs.

Upon listening to her carefully, I concluded that she was overfeeding her birds because 5 ½ bags of feed a day should be enough to feed 2,500 birds who are between 30 and 36 weeks old. Hence with a bag (50Kg) of standard commercial feed going for GH¢ 120, she shouldn’t be spending more than GH¢ 19,800 a month on feed.

So clearly, if she is preparing her feed and she’s spending close to GH¢ 24,000 in a month on that, you could tell that there is a problem. Lo and behold I was right because it turned out that she was giving her birds 8 bags of feed a day instead of 5 or 5 ½ bags.

You see, because she wasn’t keeping track of her financial records, she couldn’t realize that it was possible to cut some expenses. Now if spending GH₵ 24,000 amounts to 12,000Kg of feed in a month, the standard 8,250Kg should cost the farmer just around GH₵ 16,500. Assuming feed makes up 66% of the total expenses, her total costs for raising 2500 birds should be around GH₵ 25,000 in a month instead of the current GH₵ 24,000 she’s spending on feed alone.

Also, she was complaining that her customers were not giving her a good price for her eggs. They were offering her GH¢ 16 for a crate of 30 eggs. Now assuming her 2500 birds produce 1,667 crates of eggs in a month, her total revenue is going to be GH¢ 26,672.

Now instead of making a loss of GH¢ 9,692 (I’m even assuming that her overfed birds will provide optimal laying results), she could be making a GH¢ 1,672 profit.

The point of this article is that if you are not religiously keeping up to date financial records, you can’t really tell the direction which your farm is going and even if you realize that things are going wrong, you may struggle to pinpoint the exact cause.

Now if you are reading this article, you may be interested in starting a poultry farm. Don’t just jump in naively. Get yourself a very good business plan before you start so you can avoid certain mistakes.

Also, if you are struggling to keep financial records for your farm, you can contact us for your professional bookkeeping service which would provide you with monthly, quarterly and yearly financial statements.